Survey Experiments: Partisan Cues in Multi-party Systems

Abstract

While the vast majority of the chapters in this volume focus on experiments conducted in a laboratory setting, experiments have also long been prevalent in the discipline in the context of survey research. While many of these earlier experiments were designed with the idea of teasing out the nuances of survey research itself, the survey-based experiment remains an excellent option for researchers interested in exploring substantive questions of politics to this day (Gaines et al., 2006). With that in mind, the purpose of this chapter is two-fold. We begin by explaining the value of survey experiments as a research tool for political scientists generally. We then spend the bulk of the chapter illustrating the types of questions and challenges that can come up in survey experiments through the rubric of one particular experiment we designed to explore the effects of partisan cues in the multiparty systems of Poland, Hungary and Russia. We conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the use of deception in survey experiments, including why it is often necessary and the extent to which it has different consequences from the use of deception in lab-based experiments.