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Experimental approaches to political science research have become increasingly prominent in the discipline. Experimental research is regularly featured in some of the discipline's top journals, and indeed in 2014 a new Journal of Experimental Political Science was created, published by Cambridge University Press. At the same time, there are disagreements among political scientists about the limits of experimental research, the ethical challenges associated with this research, and the general model of social scientific inquiry underlying much experimental research. Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences, edited by Dawn Langan Teele (Yale University Press 2015), brings together many interesting perspectives on these issues. And so we have invited a number of political scientists to comment on the book, the issues it raises, and the more general question of "the uses and abuses of experimentation in the social sciences."

The essays in this special issue of the California Journal of Public Policy examine the empirical evidence for an effect of the top two primary early in its implementation. The essays examine whether voters and candidates are likely to overcome the hurdles necessary to produce more moderate, pragmatic representation. The bulk of the research reaches common conclusions from different approaches.

After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choices between co-partisan candidates (two Democrats, for example, or two Republicans). We use the publicly available Google Trends data, which provides the rate of searching for particular words, to evaluate whether Californians are more likely to search for the names of legislators who faced co-partisan challengers in their general election than to search for the names of legislators who faced opposite-partisan challengers in the general election. We find evidence of increased search for the general election and, moreover, find that there is no increase for the primary election, suggesting that when the typical voter loses a key electoral cue (the party label) the voter will rely upon other sources of information to make a voting decision.

New media and electoral representation -- The American 'internet' voter -- Googling political information -- Debating politics in the YouTube comments section -- Receiving tweets from politicians -- Discussing politics Face(book)-to-Face(book) -- Conclusion.

Pre-election opinion poll results for U.S. presidential contests have large variation in the early parts of the primary campaigns, yet pre-election opinion polls later in the campaign are typically within several percentage points of the actual outcome of the contest in November. This paper argues this trend demonstrates that voters are beginning to poll "correctly" -- that is, to ascertain their most-preferred candidate. This convergence process is consistent with boundedly rational voters making decisions with low information. We examine the process by which voters can use opinion polls to guide their candidate choice. We undertake a series of laboratory experiments where uninformed voters choose between two candidates after participating in a series of pre-election polls. We demonstrate that voters update their beliefs about candidate locations using information contained in the opinion polls. We compare two behavioral models for the updating process and find significant evidence to support a boundedly rational Bayesian updating assumption. This assumption about the updating process is key to many theoretical results which argue that voters have the potential to aggregate information via a coordination signal and for their beliefs to converge to the true state of the world. This finding also indicates that uninformed voters are able to use pre-election polls to help them make correct decisions. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research—that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California's primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors' results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.