Professors Offer a Reality Check For Politicians
By LYNNLEY BROWNING


When Leonard Wantchekon set out to investigate what kind of campaign
messages are most effective, he could have done the standard review of past
political advertisements or interviewed candidates, consultants and voters.
But Professor Wantchekon, who teaches politics at New York University and is
an expert in game theory, wanted a more scientific approach.

So he chose a novel but controversial approach: instead of observing an
election, he participated in one.

Born and reared in Benin, Professor Wantchekon decided to use the 2001
presidential primary in his small West African home country as his case
study. As a younger man, he had helped found the Democratic Front of Benin,
in the early 1980's the only opposition group to military rule in that
country, and in 1988immigrated to Canada as a political refugee. With his
previous political ties, he was able to convince Benin's four primary
candidates to allow him and his researchers to write and disseminate
campaign messages for each of them and then test them on villagers.

Working hand in hand with the two opposition and two pro-government parties,
Professor Wantchekon and his team created two types of messages. One used
specific promises — to build schools, clinics and roads in a particular
village, for example; the other invoked a much broader appeal to improve the
nation's general welfare. The team enlisted tribal leaders, soccer stars,
popular musicians and local officials to help deliver their messages. From
December 2000 to the primary in March 2001, they campaigned in about 20
villages, each with some 700 inhabitants. Each village was randomly assigned
to receive either the specific promise or the broad appeal. Some 4.1 million
voters in other villages who received the candidates' regular campaign
messages, and not ones prepared for the experiment, served as a control
group.

The research, known as a field experiment, was unusual, Professor Wantchekon
said, because "it involved real candidates in real elections."

But intervening in real elections creates problems, say some political
scientists, who argue that potentially tampering with election results is
unethical, as is having people unknowingly participate in an experiment.

"There are some major ethical concerns with field experiments in that they
can affect election results and bring up important considerations of
informed consent," said Rebecca B. Morton, who also teaches politics at New
York University.

F. Christopher Arterton, dean of the Graduate School of Political Management
at George Washington University, said he was not familiar with the study but
cautioned that in general with field experiments, "one has to be careful not
to cross the line between being a researcher and being an advocate."

Professor Wantchekon, who still counts himself among the pro-democracy
advocates in Benin, said such concerns were overblown. Villages were
carefully screened to help ensure that the experiment would not influence
the results, he said. Only villages where the votes were not close in the
previous election were selected. (As it turned out, the incumbent, Mathieu
Kérékou, a Marxist former military ruler, won). Professor Wantchekon also
argued that it was perfectly reasonable not to inform villagers that they
were participating in his experiment because doing so would have skewed the
study's results. In the end, he emphasized, it would be the villagers who
might eventually benefit from his findings.

Professor Wantchekon said his results, which are under peer review, showed
that specific promises worked well for incumbents, but not for challengers
or underdogs, who won more votes when they used broad appeals. Women also
preferred broad appeals. The findings, he added, could sharpen the political
debate: "There are clear benefits to voters from this experiment."
Candidates courting women, he said, might be motivated to work for more
lasting changes in children's health care and education.

To Professor Wantchekon and other proponents of field experiments, that
method has a scientific rigor that is lacking in other types of political
analysis. It is well accepted in medical research, for example: when
scientists test new medical treatments, they compare a new drug to an
existing one or to a placebo by testing it on people who are randomly chosen
and who do not know which drug they are getting. Random selection gives
researchers confidence that any difference in results between the two groups
is due to the treatment. Similarly, field experiments, supporters say,
promise to shed light on important political questions, from why people vote
to what makes for successful welfare reform.

"We see experiments in medicine and say, `We can do that,' " said Donald P.
Green, who heads the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale
University, a research center that sponsors field experiments, including
Professor Wantchekon's.

Professor Green concedes that critics of the method raise important
questions. But in his view, designing social programs around untested
theories or allowing problems to go unfixed is worse than staging randomized
experiments that can produce important findings.

Some scholars point out that because the method takes the researcher into
the real world with all its complexities, it offers less control over what
is being measured, which makes the results less verifiable. Unlike the messy
real world and all its hard-to-control variables, the laboratory is
"refreshingly free of confounding influences," argues James E. Alt, director
of the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard
University, who says he personally favors statistical analyses.

But Professor Alt also acknowledges that the artificial environment of the
laboratory can distort results. He said that while some researchers in
recent years have sought to make laboratory experiments more realistic —
setting up television sets in shopping malls, for example, where
participants can view campaign commercials in a natural setting — laboratory
experiments still lack the context and realism of the field.

Field experiments began in the 1920's with agronomists, who wanted to
improve crop yields — hence the method's name. An early experiment in
politics, in 1927, looked at voter turnout in Chicago.

Although a handful of political scientists tried the technique, their
efforts were almost completely forgotten by the 1960's, as the statistical
revolution swept through the social sciences, including political science
and economics.

A small but influential group of academics, including Professor Green, began
resurrecting field experiments in the late 1990's in an effort to put the
"science" back in political science.

He began in his own backyard. He and Alan S. Gerber, another political
scientist at Yale, wanted to find out which type of campaign was most
effective in getting voters to the polls: mailings, telephone or
door-to-door canvassing. During the 1998 local elections in New Haven,
Professors Green and Gerber randomly surveyed 30,000 registered voters. They
found that canvassing in person increased turnout by 9 percentage points.
Telephone appeals had no effect. Mailings increased turnout by up to several
percentage points, depending on how frequently they were sent out. The
results, they said, could be used to create programs that promoted greater
voter turnout.

There are huge questions that field experimentation cannot answer, for
obvious ethical and logistical reasons. For example, what conditions make
for a successful coup d'état and what causes genocide? And while scholars
might find it useful to identify the reason people don't bother to vote,
most would consider it unethical to stage an experiment that kept voters
away from the polls.

Kathleen McGraw, who teaches political science at Ohio State University,
said that while field experiments provided more rigorous findings that could
be used to improve democracy, the ethics of a particular experiment must be
considered on a case-by-case basis. "It all comes down," she said, "to
whether in specific experiments, the potential benefits outweigh the
potential harm" to participants.

One place likely to feel the impact of field experiments, if they become
more widely used, is the multimillion-dollar political-consulting industry,
which thrives on creating campaign messages of unproven and untested value,
said Professor Arterton of George Washington University. "It's an industry
that is very skilled at talking about the factors that produce a result," he
said, "but it's not very effective. Field experiments could make some
political consulting firms out there very uncomfortable."





>From: Momodou Camara <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Do you want to win an election?
>Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 10:42:19 +0200
>
>On 31 Aug 2002 at 0:21, Ousman Gajigo wrote:
>
> > Here is an interesting piece from the New York Times on the science or
>art
> > of winning an election.
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/arts/31FIEL.html
> >
> > If only one could find a proven mathematically formula for PDOIS...
> >
> > Ousman
> >
>
>Hi Ousman,
>Could you please send the piece? It seems one has to be a registered member
>to
>be able to access the information.
>
>regards,
>Momodou Camara
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
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>[log in to unmask]
>
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