Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical

Abstract

On one level, the idea here is simple: organise people into small groups and see how they react to different ways of doing politics. On another, it is more challenging: evaluate different political principles by seeing how people behave when they have to work with them. Do they, for example, become more or less engaged as we alter the number of chairing roles, debates, and votes? Do they stick around longer in-person or online? Do they come back more or less often when key powers are distributed by lottery? There is then a focus here, not on the decisions participants make, as found in ‘X-Phi’ and deliberative-democracy experiments, but rather on the process by which they came to make those decisions. We want to know how they found that process as a way of doing politics. Or, more precisely, how they reacted to the institutions and in turn principles those processes represent, because, if we know that, we also know something fundamental about the value of those principles.