Research Training Group World Politics RTG 2225

Some policies work, others don’t. If social policies work, they successfully mitigate an identified social problem and thereby improve people’s lives. If social policies don’t work, they fail to deliver on their promises and may at worst harm the people they were supposed to benefit. Wouldn’t it be great if we could know whether policies will work before implementing them? That is the promise of large-scale social field experiments. Much like medical trials used to test new drugs, field experiments randomly assign a few thousand people to ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ groups, and then try to assess if the ‘treatment’ policy has better effects than the ‘control’ policy. If so, this is seen as evidence that policy implementation on a larger scale makes sense.

Social field experiments have become extremely popular over the past 20 years. They have been said to constitute a ‘credibility revolution’ in applied social science, and some of their greatest advocates have recently been awarded a Nobel Prize. However, the extent and timing of this success story remains puzzling. For instance, even though the idea of social field experiments has been around for at least 50 years, scientific, political, and ethical critiques had long made experiments an overly controversial proposal. Conversely, from a contemporary perspective in which field experiments have become widely accepted, one might equally wonder why they were not popular all along.

The project therefore asks: How did experimental testing of social policies and programs become increasingly attractive in the early 2000s, when this same idea had seemed much less persuasive before? To answer this question, I reconstruct power dynamics and discourses within a diverse network of governmental and non-governmental organizations. Rather than taking a political or normative stance toward field experiments, I examine how their current popularity originated within an emerging ‘global field’ of interconnected social actors.

• Neuwinger, M. (2022). ‘The Rise of Large-Scale Social Field Experiments. A Controversial Idea and its Global Diffusion’. Poster presented at 41st Congress of the German Sociological Association (DGS): “Polarisierte Welten”, 26-30 September, Bielefeld University

• Neuwinger, M. (2022). ‘Talking the challenges talk: Do international actors increasingly talk about ‘global challenges? Does that matter? And if so, why?’. Paper presented at RTG workshop: “Global Challenges in World Politics: Discourses, Actors and Outcomes”, 06-07 September, Bielefeld University

• Neuwinger, M. (2022). Participation in the workshop “Science and Democracy Network Meeting and STS Summer School”, Malte Neuwinger, 24-31 July, Harvard University, United States.

• Neuwinger, M. (2022). Participation in the virtual conference ‘Freedom, Justice and Esteem: Perspectives from an Unconditional Basic Income’, 03-04 March, Technischen Universität Braunschweig, online.

• Neuwinger, M. (2022). Participation in the virtual workshop ‘Methodologien der quantitativen Sozialwissenschaft: Wechselverhältnisse von Theorie, Methodologie und Quantifizierung’, 17-18 February, Technischen Universität Berlin, online.

• Neuwinger, M. (2021). ‘Talking the Challenges Talk: How do Social Actors Vary in their Rhetoric of Addressing “Grand Challenges”?’. Paper presented at the RTG Workshop ‘Global Challenges in World Politics: Discourses, Actors and Outcomes’, 14 December, Bielefeld University, online.

• Neuwinger, M. (2021). Participation in the virtual conferene 'Evidence for Development: What Works Global Summit 2021', 18-27 October, online.

• Neuwinger, M. (2021). Participation in the ECPR Virtual Winter School in Methods and Techniques course ‘Social Network Analysis’, 22-26 March, online.
• Neuwinger, M. (2019). 'Das Experiment: Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen'. Presentation held at the 50 Year Anniversary Student Conference, Bielefeld University.