CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Labzina, Elena Pavlovna |
|---|---|
| Title | No Free Lunch: Costs and Benefits of Using the Concept of Natural Experiments in Political Science |
| Summary | Natural experiment is a research design which is widely employed in modern Political Science. However, in the existing literature the understanding of it is ambiguous. The major aim of the work is to diminish the ambiguity. In the paper the existing theoretical framework on the topic is developed with introducing the notion of the expected exchangeability treatment assumption and redefining the ’as-if’ treatment randomization assumption. First, an overview of the research design methods in the Political Science is made briefly. Second, the concept of a natural experiment is critically analyzed and the definition is formulated precisely. Third, the assessment algorithm to evaluate a proposed natural experiment in a sense of its success in terms of the validity is introduced. Lastly, the examples of the applications of the algorithm to seven cases of natural experiments in Political Science are provided. |
| Supervisor | Rudas, Tamas |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/labzina_elena.pdf |
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