Melhorando a inferência causal: aspectos positivos e limitações de experimentos naturais

Social scientists increasingly exploit natural experiments in their research. This article surveys recent applications in political science, with the goal of illustrating the inferential advantages provided by this research design. When treatment assignment is less than “as if” random, studies may be something less than natural experiments, and familiar threats to valid causal inference in observational settings can arise. The author proposes a continuum of plausibility for natural experiments, defined by the extent to which treatment assignment is plausibly “as if” random, and locates several leading studies along this continuum.Cientistas Sociais crescentemente exploram experimentos naturais em suas pesquisas. Este artigo faz um levantamento de aplicações recentes na Ciência Política, com o objetivo de mostrar as vantagens inferenciais proporcionadas por este tipo de desenho da pesquisa. Quando um tratamento designado é menos do que "como se" aleatoriamente, estudos podem se constituir em algo menos do que experimentos naturais e ameaças a inferência causal valida em cenários de observação podem surgir. O autor propõe um continuum de plausibilidade para experimentos naturais, definidos pela magnitude em que o tratamento designado é plausível "como se" aleatório e identifica vários estudos nesse continuo

Brokers, voters and clientelism

The book is about distributive politics. The received theories usually predict that parties and governmentswill spend scarce resources on responsive voters. And these responsive voters will be fence-sitters, people who might otherwise not turn out or vote for the party responsible for the distribution but who could be swayed by a favor or a program. Yet over and over again, the evidence seemed to tell us that not fence-sitters but firm party loyalists were the primary beneficiaries of the distributive game. Because we believed in the received theories, we discarded them only reluctantly. Like good Kuhnians, a few anomalies did not shift our paradigm. But eventually the weight of the anomalies was too much. Constructing an alternative theory was only one of the tasks we faced. Our new theory suggested new questions and new observational implications. Many parties can be decomposed into leaders and low-level operatives or brokers. If brokers play the distributive game by different rules than do their leaders, allocations of resources should come out differently when brokers are in control and when leaders are in control. (They do.) If brokers are imperfect agents of party leaders, antimachine reform movements, when they break out, may be driven as much by party leaders as by non-partisan reformers. (In several countries, they have been.) And if brokers are imperfect agents, it should be the case that they impose agency losses on parties and parties should devise elaborate techniques to monitor the brokers and minimize these losses. (We offer evidence that both are true.)Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades. Escuela de Historia; Argentina.Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina.Fil: Brusco, Valeria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina.Ciencia Polític

The moderating effect of debates on political attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects

Concepts and Measurement in Multimethod Research

This article argues that concept misformation and conceptual stretching undermine efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods in multimethod research (MMR). Two related problems result from the mismatch of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts. Mechanism muddling occurs when differences in the connotation of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts embed different causal properties into conceptual definitions. Conceptual slippage occurs when qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts use incompatible nominal, ordinal, or radial scales. Instead of gaining leverage from the synthesis of large- and small-N analysis, these problems can push MMR in two diametrically opposed directions, emphasizing one methodological facet at the cost of the other.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning

The Role of Iteration in Multi-Method Research

Self-consciously “multi-method ” research seems on the rise in many corners of the discipline. Recent political science dissertations, in particular, seem to draw increasingly on some combination of fieldwork, game theory, statistical analysis, qualitative historical-institutional comparisons, ethnography, and other approaches. Why is multi-method work so attractive? One powerful reason may be that multi-method research appears to offer the possibility of triangulating on a given research problem, allowing scholars to leverage the distinctive but complementary strengths of different research methods to make progress on substantively important topics. Thus analysts strive to move between evidence on aggregate correlations and evidence on mechanisms, to combine broad general theory with fine-grained detail from case studies, to motivate a large-N analysis with a few well-chosen cases, or to marry “data set observations ” to “causal process observations ” drawn from focused qualitative research (Collier, Brady and Seawright 2004). 2 The particular ways in which different methods should or can be combined