The third component of the research project involves a series of laboratory experiments designed to complement the analyses of party strategies and voter choice by explicating the underlying causal mechanisms.
In most of the experiments the participants will be invited to vote (or not) for one of the parties or candidates running in the election.
The primary dependent variables will be:
- whether participants decide to vote or to abstain,
- whether they vote sincerely or strategically,
- and whether they vote « correctly » or not.
The main treatments will be:
- the electoral system,
- the number of parties or candidates,
- and the amount and nature of available information.
We will also perform a number of experiments in which the participants will be party leaders who have to decide whether to coordinate or not with other parties, whether to attack or not their adversaries, and which policy positions to adopt.
Timeline
We plan to conduct a total of 30 experiments over the course of the entire project. In a typical year, we will perform five experiments, two in Montreal (CIRANO), two in Vancouver (UBC), and one in the U.S. or Europe. We will limit ourselves to two experiments in the first year of the project and three in the final year.
The basic hypotheses to be tested will be decided in the spring of a given year, the experimental protocol will be finalized in the summer, the experiments will take place in the fall, and the analysis of the results will be performed in the winter.
Find out more about the upcoming milestones for the laboratory experiments.
Team members
This component of the study is under the joint direction of Professors Fred Cutler and Jim Engle-Warnick.
The following researchers will also be involved: André Blais, Martial Foucault, Matthew Golder, Thomas Gschwend, James Kuklinski, Jean-François Laslier, Claude Montmarquette, Benjamin Nyblade, Victoria Savalei, Laura Stephenson, and Karine van der Straeten.
