Policy Experimentation Aversion

9 July 2024

We aim to study people’s opinions about policy experimentation. Two recent studies show conflicting evidence: the study by Meyer et al. (2019) in PNAS finds experimentation aversion in a variety of contexts, while Mislavsky et al. (2019) finds in the context of business experimentation that people only oppose experiments when the experiment involves a policy that they disapprove of. Neither of these studies uses a representative sample of the population. Moreover, only very few of the experiments studied in these papers concern policy experiments. In our research we combine the most powerful elements of these two studies and will work with a representative dataset (LISS) to study how voters think about policy experimentation and why they think about them in that way. This is not only of scientific relevance, but also of great policy relevance.