The Evolution Of Western Political Science Experimental Research And Its Enlightenment To The Development Of Chinese Political Science

The new central collective leadership, with president Xi as the core, presented that CCP would set “Improving and developing the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, promoting the modernization of national management system and management ability”as the general target of comprehensively deepening reform in the report of the third plenary session of CCP. In political science field, as a response of the turning from correlation analysis to causality analysis, Political Experiment Research is attracting more and more attention, for it can remedy the limitation of Observational Research. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find that Political Experiment Research had been at the edge of the academic attention fora long time by reviewing its history. The change of such approach’s status benefit from not only the advancing of study methods and techniques, but more over, its ability in making up for the defect of Observational Research and response to the shift of concerns in political science. For Chinese political science studies, Experiment Research gives a vigorous boost to change the current state of Chinese political researches at which scholars overemphasis on establishing conclusions but ignore the construction of inference process. By applying the construction of formal model, reality setting independent variable, and dependent variable measure, researchers could be capable of improving the reliability of their research conclusions. As a result, the horizon of Chinese political science research will be broadened. Meanwhile, considering contemporary Chinese political reality, political experiment has the capability to advance the quality of the policy making and make it scientific, democratic. On the other hand, popular participation in the experiment will contribute to the citizen political participation and grass-roots democratic construction. As one of important research branch of Political Experiment Research, in virtue of embedding experimental treatment in physical political activities, the study conclusion of Field Experiment is equipped with strong internal validity. Furthermore, it makes the external validity of Field Experiment exceed other sorts of experiment, that the setting of it is quite close to realities. Coincidentally, by analyzing the processes of policy making and policy innovation in Chinese political affairs after Reforming and Opening-up, foreign political researchers pointed that Chinese policy making and pilot policy executing possess the characteristic of “policy experiment(testing) ”. Taking Foreign academics’ attempt to apply Field Experiment to policy making processes, the author proposed that we reform Chinese “policy experiment” by applying experiment to it. Such attempt should be regarded as the breakthrough point for the development of Chinese Political Experiment Research. As for the research method which was used in the text, the author chose the article interpretation and knowledge introduction as the main research approaches. Such choice was made on a general concern that Political Experimental Research is at the frontier of the western political science research methods for Chinese political science research on the one hand, and author’s personal academic level and research ability are limited to the level of masters degree undergraduate on the other hand. However, at the end of the whole article, the author discussed the logic system and the detailed implementation of Field Experiment in the article.