Experimental Political Philosophy : A Manifesto

Experimental philosophy, as practiced by political philosophers, has tended to use experimental methods to gain leverage on traditional normative and political questions. Typically, these methods are the same ones used in cognitive and social psychology, which is to say non-incentivized, case-based surveys. While we have certainly learned a considerable amount from many of these studies, this approach ignores the extremely powerful experimental techniques available in the other social sciences, most notably economics, that can and should be leveraged by experimental political philosophers. Political philosophy is often concerned with comparative normative institutional analysis as well as the analysis of social norms. Both can profitably be studied in controlled, incentivized, economic lab experiments. By looking at the analogy between political philosophy and behavioral economics on the one hand and experimental economics on the other, we can see several different categories of types of experiments that political philosophers can do that go beyond the normal paradigms of experimental philosophy. I conclude by also suggesting how the use of simulations (agent-based models) and empirical studies can be used in tandem with experiments in political philosophy