The coming experimental revolution

Back in 2004, I wrote a post titled "Politics goes Moneyball" about the increasing use of experimentation to measure the effectiveness of campaign tactics. Since then, progress -- which has been led by Yale's Alan Gerber and Donald Green -- has been relatively slow but steady. Here's the latest sign that people are finally catching on -- the founding of a new organization called the Analyst Institute that practices "Moneyball for progressive politics":

A Job Posting from the Analyst Institute:

The Analyst Institute is hiring for several positions. We are looking for people who are analytical, quantitatively-minded, and comfortable with statistical analysis software. The more campaign experience the better, and the more experience with experimentation the better.

The Analyst Institute is a new organization that does cutting edge analytics and evaluation of voter registration, persuasion, and mobilization. We work in close collaboration with major progressive organizations around the country. Some people have described what we are trying to do as "Moneyball for progressive politics."

The executive director, Todd Rogers, is finishing a PhD at Harvard and has worked with Gerber on a turnout experiment (PDF).

The larger question is why everyone in politics, business, nonprofits, and government isn't constantly doing experiments to see what works and what doesn't. Yale's Ian Ayres recently asked this question about sports teams, which could use randomization to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies (say, a zone defense versus man-to-man in basketball), but the principle applies far more broadly. Despite all the folk wisdom out there about what works or what doesn't in politics or business, even the experts actually know very little -- it is very difficult or impossible to determine causality from observational data. By contrast, experiments are simple, cheap, and easy to evaluate. Academics in the social sciences are doing more of them, especially outside the lab (i.e. "field experiments"), but the real revolution will happen when white collar professionals start to catch on.

Comments

[Rob]

How fortunate that the Analyst Institute has been established to aid progressive campaigns. If the first such organization had been formed to aid conservatives, can you imagine the cries of outrage from the academy, the media and Democratic politicians? It would have been seen as a perversion of electoral politics. The names of Karl Rove and Lee Atwater would have been invoked. We might even have heard recollections of the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. But since the Analyst Institute is, as they say, left-leaning, the Republic is safe and no one's feathers are ruffled. Rik Hertzberg can sleep soundly tonight.

[Howard]

And maybe David Horowitz will toss and turn.

*****

But, ah, isn't this very much part of what Karl Rove did do, decades ago? (As well as some other more pernicious things.) If you want to invoke him yourself, go ahead.

What does Lee Atwater have to do with this? (BTW, he denounced many of the pernicious things that he himself had done in the field of politics - at the the end of his own short life.)

Rob imagines something different than reality, and then tells us what he thinks the reaction would be to that imagined thing (by "the academy, the media and Democratic politicians") and then uses that as a cudgel against the same entities.

Isn't that a bit removed from reality - criticizing several groups for how you say they would respond to an imagined situation?

This just sounds like whining. Get out of your "whine cellar". Ha ha ha.

[Peter H]

Rob, what the hell are you talking about? This is even sillier than your comments about Obama & Brussel Sprouts.