Scenario experiments

Abstract

Understanding the impacts of deliberation on public opinion formation, democratic legitimacy, political behaviour or other concepts is of core interest to deliberation scholars. This chapter elaborates on how scenario experiments, typically embedded in surveys, can advance these research endeavours. It argues that scenario experiments are most useful when studying the micro mechanism of internal deliberation and the macro effects of deliberative events on the wider public. Scenario experiments have multiple design advantages: the possibility to detect causal relationships, to expand the types of processes and policy issues under study, to reach a diverse respondent sample, and last, to conduct deliberation research in a cost-efficient manner. The chapter presents several studies that use scenario experiments to study deliberation and discuss how methodological innovations in experimental social science research can improve research on deliberation. The chapter concludes by pointing out potential challenges associated with scenario experiments.