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628 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2010)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0628 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Field Experiments in Comparative Politics and Policy By DONALD P. GREEN and PETER JOHN If by some quirk or device-such as a time machine, capsule, or tunnel-we were trans- ported back to 1998, a dozen years before this volume was produced, we would be thinking about field experiments in political science in a very different way than we do now. Although some early experiments had been conducted in field settings, by the 1980s, students of political behavior had largely abandoned them in favor of the analysis of large-scale surveys. Not a single field experiment was published in any political science journal in the decade pre- ceding 1998, when field experimentation began to make a comeback. The first voting experiments, examining the impact of mail, telephoning, and canvassing on turnout, had been conducted but not yet published (Gerber and Green 2000). The next wave of field experiments in political science was just about to spread from Yale University to elsewhere in the United States and around the globe. This renaissance set in motion two important changes in the discipline. These changes have occurred gradually, but a time traveler would now find them striking. One change had to do with the priority given to the rigorous estima- tion of causal effects. Prior to 1998, political scientists valued the enterprise of estimating cause-and-effect relationships, but they placed little emphasis on the role of research design, Donald P. Green is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Since 1996, he has serr las director of Yale's Institution for Social and Poliniy Stuies, an interdisciplinary research center that emphasizes field experimentation. In collaboration with his Yale colleagues, he has conducted an array of field experiments in political science, communication, crimi- nology, and education. Peter John is the Hallsworth Chair of Governance and is a director of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester, UK. He is author of Analysing Public Policy (Cassell 1998) and Local Governance in Western Europe (SAGE 2001). DOI: 10.1177/0002716209351498 ANNALS, AAPSS, 628, March 2010 6

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