Recruiting for Laboratory Voting Experiments: Exploring the (Potential) Sampling Bias
Laboratory experiments are often criticized for relying on student samples only. In this chapter, we re analyze four laboratory voting experiments that have been conducted on both student dominated and more heterogeneous samples. We find very few differences regarding the behavior of subjects. Due to data limitation, our chapter does not offer a definitive answer to the question of whether there is a sampling bias in voting experiments. However, we do claim that the researchers interested in the topic should focus how the reasoning abilities of subjects, instead of the fact of being a student, affect the behavior in the laboratory.