Behavioral Analysis in the Study of Politics: The Conflict Laboratory

Abstract

Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psychology to enrich standard economic models which assume perfectly rational individuals. Empirical research in behavioral economics typically employs incentivized experiments that use economic games with real money on the line. In these experiments, subjects are awarded financial payoffs based on the decisions they make (either individually or as part of a group) in an institutional context designed by the researcher. Behavioral economics is well suited for political science because behavioral economics is interdisciplinary by nature and political science is not bound by any particular research paradigm. At the same time, the method is still novel to many political scientists despite many years of its use to study political topics in a variety of research areas. What unites the application of the method to these areas is the explicit consideration of conflict. For instance, scholars have uncovered social conflict between groups (e.g., voter polarization in the United States) using behavioral games as measures, or they have designed experiments around elections to test theories of candidate and voter behavior. Because of the clear financial incentives, economic experiments are especially useful for studying people’s actual preferences in areas such as redistribution as opposed to their stated preferences. Finally, the method can be used to design institutions that will help overcome conflict over scarce resources. In sum, the strengths of behavioral economics include: (a) the ability to vary institutional contexts; (b) clear incentives that ensure valid measures of preferences; (c) direct measures of behaviors instead of stated intentions which could be confounded by outside pressures such as social desirability.

Bottom-Up Sovereign Debt Preferences

“…Beyond preferences for debt reduction and repayment, the present research builds on the growing recognition that the behavioral revolution in political science (Ostrom, 1998;Del Ponte et al, 2020) and international relations (Hafner-Burton et al, 2017) can help improve our understanding of politics, including citizens' preferences for economic policy (e.g., Bechtel et al (2014); Rathbun et al (2019); Huddy and Del Ponte (2019); Mutz (2021)).…”

Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties

“…More generally, these methods use money to measure social value, following the methods of experimental economics which are often used in experimental political science (Del Ponte et al 2020;Ostrom 1998; for a few examples, see Del Ponte et al 2017;Delton et al 2020;Kanthak & Woon 2015). Money can be used to measure value because people have a deeper sense of value that allows them to compare different goods and services on a common scale (money, food, shelter, tools, medicine, etc.).…”

Conducting quantitative studies with the participation of political elites: best practices for designing the study and soliciting the participation of political elites

“…These studies often use non-incentivized survey experiments (Baekgaard et al 2019;Butler and Dynes 2016;Butler et al 2017;Fatas et al 2007;Harden 2013;Helfer 2016;Meng et al 2017;. In a non-incentivized experiment, participants do not receive a financial payoff based on their decision; in an incentivized experiment, they do (Ponte et al 2020). 4 An example of an incentivized survey experiment with politician participants is Linde and Vis (2017).…”