Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical

Abstract

On one level, the idea here is simple: organise people into small groups and see how they react to different ways of doing politics. On another, it is more challenging: evaluate different political principles by seeing how people behave when they have to work with them. Do they, for example, become more or less engaged as we alter the number of chairing roles, debates, and votes? Do they stick around longer in-person or online? Do they come back more or less often when key powers are distributed by lottery? There is then a focus here, not on the decisions participants make, as found in ‘X-Phi’ and deliberative-democracy experiments, but rather on the process by which they came to make those decisions. We want to know how they found that process as a way of doing politics. Or, more precisely, how they reacted to the institutions and in turn principles those processes represent, because, if we know that, we also know something fundamental about the value of those principles.

Full text

Res Publica
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-025-09703-4
Abstract
On one level, the idea here is simple: organise people into small groups and see
how they react to dierent ways of doing politics. On another, it is more challeng-
ing: evaluate dierent political principles by seeing how people behave when they
have to work with them. Do they, for example, become more or less engaged as we
alter the number of chairing roles, debates, and votes? Do they stick around longer
in-person or online? Do they come back more or less often when key powers are
distributed by lottery? There is then a focus here, not on the decisions participants
make, as found in ‘X-Phi’ and deliberative-democracy experiments, but rather on
the process by which they came to make those decisions. We want to know how
they found that process as a way of doing politics. Or, more precisely, how they
reacted to the institutions and in turn principles those processes represent, because,
if we know that, we also know something fundamental about the value of those
principles.
Keywords Experimental political theory · Experimental political philosophy ·
Realist political theory · Normative behaviourism · Experimental philosophy ·
Experimental political science · Methods · Methodology
As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be dierent opin-
ions, so is it that there should be dierent experiments of living; that free scope
should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the
worth of dierent modes of life should be proved practically, when any one
thinks t to try them. (Mill, On Liberty)
Accepted: 28 December 2024
© The Author(s) 2025
Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
JonathanFloyd1
Jonathan Floyd
Jonathan.Floyd@bristol.ac.uk
1 School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
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J. Floyd
It is the task of the critical theoretician to reduce the tension between his own
insight and oppressed humanity in whose service he thinks. (Horkheimer, Criti-
cal Theory: Selected Essays)
Introduction
If political philosophy is fundamentally concerned with the question ‘How should we
live?’, yet nds that question ‘impossible’ to answer (Floyd 2017a), then that could
be for several good reasons. It could be because human beings are ‘imperfect’, fol-
lowing Mill, or ‘oppressed’, following Horkheimer, or indeed both, as seems likely.
Perhaps though it is also something else; something more methodological. Perhaps
we spend too much time looking in, sat in our armchairs and thinking about our
thinking, and not enough time looking out, studying the world as it is and observing
carefully how ideas succeed and fail within it. If so, perhaps there is something we
could do to speed up that observational work, by playing a more proactive role in this
world and what it tells us. Perhaps, that is, we could become experimenters, by run-
ning practical tests on the principles that interest us, and thus making them not just
the subject of reection, but also of observation.
Broadly speaking, the idea here is to put into practice dierent rules regarding how
we organise ourselves, understood as expressions of dierent political principles,
and then see what kind of behaviour those rules produce. So, rather than sitting at
home and guessing what people would choose in various scenarios, as is common
in our eld, or even discovering what people do choose in surveys or focus-groups,
as a few of us now do (Baderin 2023), here we take a dierent path. Here, we focus
not on what people choose at all, but rather on how they experience and then react
to whatever rules they are being regulated by when asked to make such choices. Or,
from a dierent angle, the aim is not to study what people decide, and thus the politi-
cal policies those decisions suggest, but rather how they found the decision-making
process along the way, and thus the political institutions those processes represent.
In what follows, I explain and defend this approach via three steps. First, an
account of its distinctiveness, focussing in particular on how it diers from other
forms of ‘experimental’ moral and political philosophy, including those projects
found in the world of ‘deliberative democracy’. Second, an account of its usefulness,
focussing in particular on its ability to address three quite dierent challenges for
political theorists: (1) how to connect theory and practice at a general level, whilst
avoiding the traps of excessive radicalism or conservatism; (2) how to combine the
anti-ideology politics of ‘critical political theory’ with the pro-science precision of
‘analytical political philosophy’; and (3) how to ll a persistent gap in a more recent
form of political philosophy—‘normative behaviourism’—in which we are some-
how supposed to ‘experiment’ with improvements or alternatives to ‘social liberal
democracy’, yet are not really told how. Third, an account of its robustness, focus-
sing in particular on a nagging problem for any experimental work in the human sci-
ences: how much do the experiments themselves ultimately matter, when it comes to
principle justication, given that experimenters might simply ignore ‘bad’ results as
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
temporary setbacks, whilst pouncing on ‘good’ ones as instant proof of exactly what
they already believed.
Distinctiveness, Pt 1: Experimentation Beyond the Choice Agenda
Although we now have rich and established literatures on experimental moral philos-
ophy (Lütge et al. 2014; Williamson 2016), as well as experimental political science
(Druckman and Green 2021; Grönlund and Herne 2022; Mazumder and Yan 2023),
there remains little in the way of experimental ‘political theory’ or ‘political philoso-
phy’, despite Frohlich and Oppenheimer’s path-breaking work more than 30 years
ago, in which the key challenge was to gure out just which principles of justice ‘we’
really would choose under approximated ideal choice conditions, and thus in turn
whether Rawls or Harsanyi had made better ‘predictions’ regarding such ‘results’
(Frohlich and Oppenheimer 1992, pp. 2–23). Despite countless ‘X-Phi’ studies in
support of either consequentialist or deontological reasoning, as well as a matching
number of ‘XPS’ studies on the eects of this or that variable on electoral outcomes,
there is still almost nothing in the way of experimental attempts to either support or
critique principles that are both normative and overtly political at the same time.
Perhaps though this is starting to change, if only on a small scale. In just the last
two years, we have had, inter alia, innovative work on attitudes to migration (Gerver
et al. 2023), corruption (Bicchieri et al. 2023), labour-mixing (Nichols and Thrasher
2023), and healthcare (Hassoun 2023); studies on how real people respond to help
from articial intelligence with their political deliberations (Tessler et al. 2024; but
also Buhmann and Fieseler 2023; and Mikhaylovskaya 2024); and computer simu-
lations of how dierent preferences could lead to certain patterns of gentrication
and segregation, building in this case on Schelling’s famous but much older work
along the same lines (Schelling 1971; Muldoon 2023). We have also had analyses
of how such work in general might support several of the tasks which conventional
political theory is already engaged in, with the key hope there being that such analy-
sis, if persuasive, might encourage yet more experimentation in the future (Lindauer
2023; Thrasher 2023; Midtgaard 2024; Lippert-Rasmussen 2024; Miller 2025). So,
although the eld remains small, there is hope that it is growing.
Notice though something interesting that all parts of this literature have in com-
mon: the idea of choice. That is, each of these studies, one way or another, asks
roughly the following question: What is it that real people actually choose once they
have been put in this or that situation? For example, do they choose this or that kind
of justice under conditions of impartiality? Do they have these or those intuitions
about equality when presented with dierent tax codes? Do they value pain-relief
over life-extension when trading o health resources? Do they open borders to this
or that extent in response to this or that kind of migration? And so on and so forth.
We have then here, with these studies, a rather simple and appealing method: orga-
nise a set of causal variables—the situation and its stimuli—and in turn get a set of
results—the choice or choices—bearing in mind, of course, that those ‘situations’ are
themselves typically imaginary, insofar as they are merely described to those taking
part in the experiment. There is though still something very dierent about this work
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J. Floyd
when compared to traditional ‘armchair’ theorising, even when that theorising is
worked up into ‘wide reective equilibrium’ (Rawls 1971; Floyd 2017b). Rather than
asking myself what I think any reasonable person would do in this or that scenario,
or reading other philosophers to answer the same question, I am instead getting large
numbers of people to contemplate the same thing, and indeed, not just contemplate,
but also, in many experiments, discuss amongst themselves what they think the right
choice would be before they make it.
There is, however, at least one very interesting question left untouched by such
work: how exactly did the participants involved experience and then react to the
process to which they were subjected? Or, put dierently, how did they respond to
the particular ways in which they got to discuss and deliberate whatever decision
they were asked to make? Did they, for example, nd that these ways angered and
polarised them? Did they get bewildered and disengage? Did they stop talking about
the policy choices on the table altogether and instead start critiquing their fellow par-
ticipants? Or, to really bring out the idea of behavioural observation here, did they
cross their arms and look at the ground or start wildly gesticulating with excitement?
Did they get louder or quieter? Did they leave the room, and, even if they did not,
did they come back again for later sessions, either online or in person, after the rst
experiment they took part in?
Now, to be clear on this point, it is not as if the experimenters discussed a moment
ago are completely uninterested in such things. Clearly they care if the room divides
rather than unites, and whether participants fully take part or not, as these things aect
their results. Clearly too they cover some of these problems in their reports. There is
though a key dierence: they ultimately only care about such things to the extent that
they aect their ability to get a clear answer. What they want is a clear rst-choice
that looks like ‘the people’s verdict’. What they are not interested in, at least to the
same extent, is how those people actually found the process they took part in as a
kind of politics. Or, more precisely, and assuming we are just talking about collective
group-work here, rather than individual surveys, they are not nearly so interested in
how the political principles expressed by the structure of the experiment—such as
how people were allowed to deliberate and vote—could be seen as themselves under
investigation, with the key results, from this procedural perspective, then being the
behaviour those principles produced when put into operation.
Why though, if this alternative behavioural focus is the proposition on oer,
should anyone care about this beyond the instrumental interest just noted? After all,
if you run a game, gather a survey, or organise a focus-group, what you normally
want, when it comes to both political theory and political practice, is precisely these
choices or decisions described a moment ago, and for good reason. You want to know
what people really want by discovering what they actually choose, when it comes to
resource or power distributions, and when exposed to this or that set of options or
arguments, so that you then know, presumably, what sorts of policies to put on the
table in real politics—and indeed so that you also have a rather useful kind of public
justication for doing so. There is then real gold to be dug up here by the choice-
experimenters, as they see it, because what you have here is the prospect, not just of
identifying distinctive principles or policies, depending on the level of abstraction at
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
which the exercise takes place, but also of being able to justify them in, respectively,
either the philosophical or political domain.
There is, nonetheless, still something missing here, because even that gold, if dis-
covered, still only covers half of what we typically care about when we care about
politics, given that along with getting the best policies, we also care about having
the right institutions, and not just in terms of what they give us or how they treat
us, but also in terms of what role we have or could have within them. An election, a
parliament, a civil service, a president, a parish council, a referendum—each of these
involves, not just a set of powers, but also a set of processes, and thus principles,
in virtue of which people come to have those powers, meaning that these too are
principles that can be tested or ‘experimented’ on over time. One vote one person,
equal speaking time to all, chair-roles allocated by lottery, rotating leaders every
ten minutes, consultations with expert witnesses, transferable votes with one option
eliminated each cycle—each of these and more are principles that can be seen, not
just as a way of structuring a group ‘experiment’, where what you care about is the
nal choice, but also as that experiment’s subject.
Consider, for example, experiments designed to answer the following questions:
does having one ‘chair’ or two in a discussion lead to more people talking and fewer
people leaving? Does having multiple votes throughout the session keep everyone
involved? Does rotating the chair-roles by lottery keep people coming back for later
sessions? Do smaller or larger groups work better, in terms of sustained engagement,
for certain policy areas, from migration, to taxation, to the environment? Does run-
ning the sessions online mean you can get ten well-attended sessions out of each
group rather than ve, and if so, does that work better on this or that software plat-
form? And yes, of course, running such experiments is not going to tell us the big
political choices ‘real people’ want to make, from immigration to taxation, but that is
not their role. Their role, cumulatively, is to see which principles, over time, do better
than others in terms of securing positive engagement from those working with them,
or at least minimising disengagement. All of which means that to talk here of behav-
ioural experimentation in political theory is to talk of something both new and famil-
iar: experiments very similar to those mentioned earlier, yet now with a focus not
on what (most) people choose, as a guide to the policy principles on oer, but rather
on how (most) people behave, as a guide to the institutional principles in operation.
Distinctiveness, Pt 2: Experimentation Beyond the Deliberation
Agenda
Now though a new question emerges, bearing in mind developments elsewhere in
political theory over the last few decades: what exactly is the dierence here between
the kind of work just described and those much more familiar (to political philoso-
phers) set of projects grouped under ‘deliberative democracy’? After all, empirical
studies in that world typically do at least three things argued for here: (1) they focus
on procedural principles as a guide to practical institutional innovation, rather than
substantive principles as inputs for further academic arguments; (2) they focus on
policy challenges instead of abstract allocation or distribution puzzles, meaning par-
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J. Floyd
ticipants get to do ‘politics’ rather than ‘philosophy’ (to put the point rather crudely);
and (3) they do all of this in what is often explicitly an ‘experimental’ format, includ-
ing via the use of randomised-control-trials (RCTs) (Curato et al. 2021; Smith and
Setälä 2018). What then is the big new idea here?
Again, the key point concerns choice, because although deliberative theorists are
undoubtedly keen to put on trial various innovative decision-making processes—pro-
vided they match certain code ideas of equality, diversity, and inclusion—the acid
test of those trials is in most cases the extent to which they achieve outcomes of a
kind already decided (Mendelberg and Karpowitz 2007). For example, does this or
that form of deliberation make people more egalitarian when it comes to tax reform?
Does this or that form of majoritarianism support cosmopolitan migration policies?
Does this or that form of sortition make decision-makers likely to prioritise the envi-
ronment? So, rather than nding out how people like to do politics, the aim here for
experimenters is to nd out just what it would take to make them do it well.
This is why, typically, the basic method in these studies is as follows: take a group
of people who in certain ways represents the public as a whole, meaning you can
label them a ‘mini-public’ (LaFont 2015; Jacquet 2019), and in turn nd a way of
organising them that gives you, ideally, a reliable (replicable), clear (singular), and
correct (in your view) choice. So, if they then turn out to be divided, angry, disen-
gaged, and so on, in the manner described earlier, then, yes, of course, that matters,
but only because it gets in the way of the higher ground you are looking for. Delibera-
tion theorists do not, for example, typically investigate further any way of doing poli-
tics that turned out to be rewarding for the people involved yet also likely to lead to,
say, tighter borders, more carbon emissions, less higher education, or the promotion
of ‘family values’. That would not be an interesting way of politics precisely because
it looks unappealing to those planning these deliberative experiments. Or, put dier-
ently, the more a procedural principle shows a tendency to produce bad outcomes,
no matter how well people behave in response to it in other ways, the less they want
to test it further. And yet, would this not be worth nding out anyway? Or, to put the
point more dramatically, in an age of widespread political disenchantment, marked
out by ‘populism’, ‘post-truth’, and ‘polarisation’ (Floyd 2022, 2024), is there not
some value in nding out what could bring people back into politics and keep them
there, however unwelcome the initial discussions?
Again, to be clear here, it is not as if there is no useful material coming out of
deliberative studies for the kinds of question mentioned. There is, for example, an
interesting body of evidence on the initial motivations people have for deliberation,
as well as on the scale of ‘trust’ produced after the exercise (Boulianne 2019; Cutler
et al. 2008; Curato and Niemeyer 2013; Gastil 2023; Walsh and Elkink 2021), and
on what happens when you encourage people to take dierent kinds of perspective
(Galinsky et al. 2005). The problem is that it is still typically focussed on getting
people to take part in, and accept the legitimacy of, whatever procedures produce the
right outcomes, which is why, as acknowledged by at least some of the practitioners
here, there remains so little in this eld in the way of ‘comparative evidence’ regard-
ing how ‘group behaviour’ varies according to ‘institutional design’ (Grönlund and
Herne 2022, p. 172). And again, to really stress the point, that does not mean this
work is doing anything wrong, anymore than the experimental work described earlier
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
was doing anything wrong. Given that it clearly produces interesting ndings, from
the point of view of those involved, there is no reason for it to change. The claim here
is simply that others, if interested in institutional innovation and questions of political
engagement, might want to try something new.
Who though are those others? Consider, for example, political theorists already
interested in dierent kinds of parliament and party system, and the particular princi-
ples they express (Waldron 2016; Bagg 2018). Consider those defending democratic
innovations more geared to adversarial reasoning (Honig 1993; Moue 2000), or
compromise and negotiation (Gutmann and Thompson 2012; Wendt 2016; Rostbøll
2017; Weinstock 2017). Consider those working on arrangements that privilege the
voice or veto of particular groups, such as the poor (McCormick 2011; Prinz and
Westphal 2024; Vergara 2020), or workers (González-Ricoy and Magaña 2024), or
municipal decision-makers (Shelley 2024).1 And consider anyone who, in the future,
might want to look at what happens when we move people from seminar rooms and
town halls to Discord channels and WhatsApp chat groups. In each case we can ask
how do people really behave in such institutional settings? How do they really react
to these processes, and thus the principles that those processes express? How do they
actually nd this or that way of doing politics? Or, more narrowly, we can ask: are
there principles that create more excitement in the short-term, but less engagement
in the long-run? Are there some producing high engagement from the few but little
from the many? And, of those producing similar levels of engagement, are there some
that do better in not just bringing people into politics and keeping them there, but also
holding them together as a people or demos, rather than as polarised individuals?
Distinctiveness, Pt 3: Experimentation Beyond Vagueness
Although there is an attractive realism to working out just how real people react to
dierent principles in practice, there is not much realism to any proposal without
practical detail, so how exactly would these experiments work in practice? Or, more
realistically still, how should we at least start such work, given that once it is up and
running, new ideas and problems will emerge as a result?
Here is an initial suggested approach. Think of academic political theorists work-
ing in pairs or teams, with at least one person free to observe at all times, even if
that person changes. Think of small groups of students or local citizens. Think of
1–2 h sessions in teaching rooms, community centres, town halls, or online forums.
And think of as much variation and repetition as possible. In this way, by keeping
the resource requirement low, you get as many people as possible running as many
experiments as possible. For example, imagine you have ten teams across ten uni-
versities in a single country, each of whom runs one session a week for ten weeks
on dierent speaking-rules on a single policy topic, such as migration. This would
mean 100 experimental results giving you at least some indication on whether these
rules, as an independent variable, play a signicant causal role in behavioural out-
1 I am particularly grateful to Manon Westphal for providing material for this section on the kinds of
democratic innovations that might be tested with this approach.
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J. Floyd
comes, despite whatever uncontrolled variation there is in the composition of those
groups, or the unintentional ways in which the organisers or their locations shape the
proceedings.
Where though would we go from there, particularly bearing in mind the nagging
worry with any such exercise: that even a thousand such gatherings, made up of
whichever students or citizens are keen enough to take part, still does not tell us
much about ‘real politics’? The key is to think cumulatively and incrementally, taking
one step at a time.2 If something works online, try it in person. If it works with ten,
try it with 20. If it works in one city, or on one topic, then try changing both, one at
a time, before later taking the further step of giving it a proper and more ‘political’
experimental setting.
This could mean, for example, running a local mayoral policy ‘consultation’ in
line with those deliberative rules that did well in earlier experiments. It could mean
convincing your parish council to try a particular voting system, at least for a month,
if that same system worked well, at least so far, in your more academic settings
the previous year. And it could mean then going to one-year or wider regional tri-
als, whilst remembering the crucial fact that each of those expansions is itself just
another experiment. It might turn out to be the case, for example, that something
works on a small or short scale but not the opposite. Or it might turn out, by some
miracle, that you go smoothly from your armchair to the UN Assembly, though that
does not have to have happened for you to have succeeded. Bear in mind here the
German idea of ‘subsidiarity’, and be happy if you nd at least one new way of doing
politics that works on at least one level of governance.
At this point, then, you could think of the proposed approach in the following
way: even if aiming for the senate, start o in the seminar, and be as cautious and
critical as possible along the way. What if, for example, the sessions you run draw
resentment across your city from those unable to take part, at least once you grant
those participants enough power? What if our taste for direct democracy peaks with
local issues yet drops away sharply with national or global? What if those online
discussion platforms you develop work well for younger voters but not for those
born before the start of this century? In each case, look hard for such problems as you
upscale, because if these experiments really are to matter, as opposed to being fake
doses of legitimation, you have to accept that you will often discover things that work
in one setting, or on one scale, but not another.
There is though also one last way in which we need to temper our ambitions here:
do not think you have to completely reinvent the wheel. Where you can infer best
experimental practice from elsewhere, including all the many ‘case studies’ in ‘delib-
erative democracy’ or ‘X-Phi’, you should do so (Asenbaum 2022; Ercan et al. 2022;
Smith and Setälä 2018). Where you can bring new people in, as co-creators or assis-
tants, do that too. And, where new and radical procedural ideas emerge in political
theory that we had not previously considered, be open to testing them as much as
possible, bearing in mind that there is no trade-o here between being careful and
radical, when the point is to be both.
2 One particularly interesting recent take on the value of incremental progress is (Biale and Fumagalli
2023). For fascinating discussion of how to measure progress, see (Cohen-Kaminitz 2023)
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
This last bit is important. It means being careful in the sense that we learn from
and work with others, critically scrutinise our results, and only upscale with reliable
replication, yet radical in the sense that we try as many ideas as possible, no matter
how far from mainstream ‘academic’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘Western’ opinion. And yes, that
might seem contradictory, but why not be both careful and radical in this way? Pre-
sumably we are more likely to succeed with the latter if we take seriously the former,
given that unless you are already some kind of Machiavelli to some kind of Prince,
you are not going to get your latest vision rolled out tomorrow. No matter how much
you care about this or that form of oppression or inequality, you are still just one
voice amongst many, so the way you get experiments to support bold agendas is to do
them well. Build your body of evidence, one step at a time, so that your radical case,
no matter how unprecedented, eventually becomes unanswerable.
Usefulness, Pt 1: Radical Theory and Cautious Practice
Having said quite a lot so far about the nature of this approach, more should be said
now about its usefulness. This will be done by working through the three problems
mentioned earlier, starting with the most general—bridging theory and practice—and
in turn the range of contemporary theoretical movements this problem infuses.
Consider then the following list: ‘political realism’ (Aytac and Rossi 2023; West-
phal 2019), ‘normative behaviourism’ (Perez 2023; Stephens 2023), ‘non-ideal the-
ory’ (Wiens 2016; Volacu 2018), ‘political political theory’ (Waldron 2016; Bagg
2018), and, most recently, ‘grounded normative theory’ (Ackerley et al. 2024). What
all of these movements share, at the very least, is a common urge for political theorists
to somehow engage more closely with ‘facts’, ‘practice’, or ‘reality’ in some sense,
with that urge in turn both driving and being driven by at least two key forces. First, a
set of debates about several of the key concepts involved, from ‘feasibility’ (Gilabert
and Lawford-Smith 2012; Cozzaglio and Favara 2022), to ‘non-compliance’ (Swift
2008; Chahboun 2015), to ‘political normativity’ (Leader Maynard and Worsnip
2018; Sleat 2022), and the nature of a ‘political context’ (Modood and Thompson
2018; Lægaard 2019). Second, a set of institutional and professional pressures, all
across the globe, to produce more ‘engaged’, ‘impactful’, or ‘relevant’ scholarship,
whether through grant application targets, training requirements, research assessment
exercises, job application criteria, and more besides (Floyd 2022).
In addition to this urge and these forces, however, and despite their key dierences,3
there is still something else these projects have in common: a rather basic worry
regarding theory and practice that is, of course, much older than just the last decade,
and which was once famously explored by Kant as part of his essay on the ‘common
saying’ that something ‘might work in theory but not practice’, as well as, going fur-
ther back, Plato’s melding of justice and prudence in the Republic (Wood 2016). This
worry, in short, is that even our most impressive ‘theories’ can be somehow either too
‘progressive’ or too ‘regressive’ for the real world as we know it to be.
3 (Rossi and Sleat 2014) are particularly helpful on this point.
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J. Floyd
What though exactly does that mean? On the one hand, it means being liable
to disaster, perhaps via some new and ill-conceived utopia, and bearing in mind
that it was probably Burke, responding to the French Revolution, that Kant himself
responded to in that famous essay of his (Wood 2016), just as many 20th-century
thinkers, working at the borderlands of liberalism and conservatism, from Berlin to
Popper to Oakeshott, spent much of their life’s work trying to deate a further set of
what they saw as excessively ‘progressive’ notions (Gray 1995, 2023). On the other
hand, it means producing ideas liable to result in no change at all, and which simply
legitimise, and thus ossify, what may well be a rotten status quo, bearing in mind that
criticising this status quo, by speaking ‘truth’ to that ‘power’, is what most political
philosophers still consider to be their core business. After all, would we ever have
had modern freedom or democracy at all, let alone for society’s more marginalised
groups, if we had allowed ourselves to be put o by every Cromwell, Robespierre,
or Lenin along the way?
In any case, the key point for present purposes, assuming that there is truth in both
sides, is that political philosophers somehow need to avoid both dangerous radical-
ism on the one hand and deferential conservatism on the other. Or, put dierently,
they need to avoid either setting the world on re with incendiary ideals or stalling
improvements by relying too complacently on the intuitions, expectations, and values
of today (Floyd 2019, pp. 91–130). This then is the point at which our behavioural
experiments come in, bearing in mind that the way they work is to carefully test, in
just small groups at rst, and under relatively safe and controlled conditions, what-
ever ideas regarding political organisation inspire us the most, no matter how radical,
and despite always treating them as dangerous chemicals to be kept rst in test tubes
and well behind safety shields, before only later moving on to cautious attempts to
roll them out more widely. So, rather than going straight from the manifesto to the
revolution, or from the armchair to the assembly, here we do something dierent.
Here we aim for a sweet spot or ‘Aristotelian Mean’ between radicalism and con-
servatism, by on the one hand considering procedural political principles as wild as
you like, whilst on the other subjecting those principles to testing under the strictest
of conditions.
Bear in mind too here that these ‘strict’ conditions are not themselves, at least nec-
essarily, inherently, or troublingly conservative, given that what we are really doing
here is making a new safe space for creative radicalism. If only for an hour, and if
only in this small or online space, we see what it is like to live another way. We see
what it would be like, given contemporary political problems, to go beyond contem-
porary political wisdom, and try those ideas which, in any other setting, would be
deemed too wild, or implausible, or even laughable. And note: not just the ideas we
start with, or take from political theory as it stands, but also those we develop from
within the process, given that over time our ideas could become even more ambitious,
by steadily turning the dial up on things that work, and by drawing on what we have
done before, all the way up to whatever point we nd falls just short of backring.
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
Usefulness, Pt 2: Analyticals and Continentals
What then of our second, middle-range problem? That is, even if we manage to avoid
being excessively radical or conservative in the manner described, are we being suf-
ciently ‘critical’ and ‘analytical’, from the perspectives of those two traditions? Are
we, for example, ghting the forces of ideology and oppression, on the one hand, yet
being precise and scientic enough, on the other, in order to be both prepared for real
policy decisions and suciently persuasive to real populations?
With this problem in mind, consider rst of all some of the aspirations of each
side, starting with ‘critical theory’, and in particular its long post-Marx battle with
‘ideology’ (Celikates 2018; Freyenhagen 2018; Floyd 2016; Sangiovanni 2023). This
means, amongst other things, not accepting any starting assumptions as simple facts
or human nature. For example, not accepting existing intuitions, beliefs, or expecta-
tions, let alone the institutional status quo, from the economy to the state to the fam-
ily, when those institutions are themselves part of why we have the expectations and
so on that dene us; when those institutions are themselves part of why we have the
beliefs and intuitions we do. It also means not denying that theorising is itself a politi-
cal act, given how it aects both thought and deed in turn. And it means not ignoring
the truth that, from professional journals to polemical pamphlets, any theory when
published becomes ‘praxis’, given how the act of publication, and choice of its loca-
tion, both expresses thought and reshapes the conditions under which further thinking
happens (Heydebrand and Burris 2020; Ludovisi 2016). And yet, if all of this is right,
where exactly should we start? Or, as an ‘analytical’ might put it, where is the ‘view
from nowhere’ or ‘Archimedean point’ we need to get things going (Nagel 1986)?
We return to that problem in a moment, after rst considering the analytical
approach, which at a minimum involves a commitment to three things: (1) clarity of
concepts, (2) consistency in arguments, and (3) overarching coherence in whatever
systems, theories, or frameworks we put together (McDermott 2008; Floyd 2016).
There is though, when it comes to moral and political theory, even more to the ana-
lytical approach than just this, because here we see also a deep-lying commitment
that rarely gets fully articulated: the thought that there is somewhere out there a
core ‘moral’ or at least ‘normative’ notion of ‘human nature’ to be discovered, as
expressed by, perhaps, our most basic beliefs, sentiments, intuitions, or ‘considered
judgements’, and as captured or unearthed by as many counter-examples, extrapola-
tions, and thought experiments as it takes (Floyd 2016). Here, by analogy, we can say
that whilst geologists have rocks and astronomers stars,4 analytical political philoso-
phers have ‘normative thoughts’, by which I mean thoughts about what should and
should not be the case in the world and what we should and should not do within it
(Floyd 2017a, pp. 99–165; Floyd 2023b). These are the essential and raw materials
which such thinkers study, chart, categorise, and so on, when looking for some way
of identifying and grounding the principles that we need to guide us.
Just like the continental project, however, this too is dicult work. Whilst the
former looks for a starting or at least nishing point beyond ideology, the ‘analytical’
4 For a similar claim about ‘rocks’ and ‘stars’, in this case specically to ‘intuitions’, which I take to be just
one kind of ‘normative thought’, see (Appiah, 2008).
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J. Floyd
needs something solid to build up from, in the sense of some normative thought, or
set of such thoughts, that is (or are) clear, consistent, and coherent enough to build
other claims on top of. Here though is the key challenge: how are they to do this when
the more we dig, the more variety we nd in our thinking, both within and between
the thought-patterns of dierent individuals? (Floyd 2017a, pp. 153–156). Or, put
dierently, the more reection we do, the less equilibrium we nd (Floyd 2017b).
Our thinking, it seems, is a ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’, so it is no surprise that
we produce almost as many theories as there are theorists, just as it is no surprise that
each of us struggles to claim ‘expertise’ in the world beyond, for what exactly is this
expertise, in the harsh light of public argument, if most of your expert colleagues
disagree with it? What, for example, is the truth of your libertarianism to your egali-
tarian colleague down the hall? How solid are the grounds of your republicanism to
the realist on the other side of the world? Or, put dierently again, how can these
‘analyticals’, in need of solid ground, say to the world that something should be done
in ‘practice’, when they cannot agree in theory?
It seems then, putting all of this together, that it is rather dicult to be either criti-
cal and action-guiding or analytical and action-guiding, just as Laegaard has shown
it is hard to maintain both ‘critical distance’ and ‘concrete context’ in the kind of
theories discussed in the last section (2019). The former, because the more critical
we are, the harder it is to nd a solid starting point from which to get our arguments
going. The latter because, the more we analyse ourselves, in terms of the detail of our
basic normative thinking, the less consistency and coherence we nd, both within and
between persons. So, what are we to do here? Or, more pertinently, where exactly
does experimentation come in?
The key point here, as with the last problem, is that these proposed behavioural
experiments aim for both radicalism in ideas and restraint in how we judge them, and
in more ways than one. First, because of the deliberative space we provide to real
theorists and citizens, we also give space to identify, discuss, and dismantle whatever
innate ‘imperfections’ or ideological ‘oppressions’ currently hold us back. Second,
because of the way in which we pursue, test, and then rene our ideas, we also facili-
tate genuine ‘praxis’ (Heydebrand and Burris 2020; Ludovisi 2016), as theory goes
out and back and out again into the real world, as expressed and embodied by each
experiment, and as changed with every feedback loop. And notice, not just any kind
of ‘praxis’. Think here, in particular, of recent discussions of ‘pre-gurative politics’,
and the way in which, with these experiments, new and radical ideas might start and
then evolve deep within the shells of whatever academic and political status quo we
start o with (Raekstad 2018; Rossi 2019; Monticelli 2022). Or, put dierently, here
we pursue radical theory and critical practice, all at the same time.
What though of the distinctive ‘analytical’ challenge? On this front, note rst of
all the scientic imperatives involved in these experiments: test, check, tweak, log,
record, and so on. These show a commitment to being as precise as possible about
the principles under scrutiny and the meaning of the results, lest we misinterpret
any particular cause or consequence, and so in turn the kind of clarity, consistency,
and coherence noted above. But it is still something dierent from the methodologi-
cal status quo. We are not, for example, pondering imaginary public radio systems
or camping trips or runaway trolleys on our own. We are not wondering what we
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
think we would choose if we did not know certain facts about ourselves. We are not
generalising from ‘me’ to ‘everyone’ whilst talking loosely of ‘we’ (Finnis 1997, p.
218). What we do here, instead, is collaborative ‘lab’ work: open, public, careful, yet
still philosophical in the sense that it is still about exploring ideas. Here we ask, for
example: does this principle, in practice, move people closer or further apart? Are
they more satised with the process when certain voices are given certain vetoes? Do
they behave in more or less polarising ways according to how many votes we cast,
or how each vote is scored or ranked? Focussing on induction rather than deduction,
here we treat principle-justication as something to be discovered in the results, not
demonstrated before we get them.
Usefulness, Pt 3? The case of Normative Behaviourism
Finally then we come to our narrowest, but also newest problem: the absence in
‘normative behaviourism’ of a clear theory of experimentation, despite it repeatedly
turning to that idea when pushed to be more ‘progressive’ (Stevens 2023; Cozzaglio
2024). On this front the hope is as follows. If, as normative behaviourism claims,
principles should be judged by how people react to them in practice, rather than
what philosophers think of them in advance, then maybe these behavioural experi-
ments are an important way in which to actually do this, beyond observing whatever
forms of politics have already been tried in the world, outside of our control. If so,
that would give this theory a way of being, not just more proactive than it has been
so far, but also less conservative (Erman and Möller 2023; Rossi 2023), as well as
better able to deal with some of the nagging problems faced by even our ‘best’ exist-
ing democracies, such as growing inequality, polarisation, and environmental decay.
This is though only hope at this stage. We cannot know in advance that it works,
as we cannot know it will nd any results worth sharing. That is the nature of exper-
imenting, so we can only try, whatever Yoda says. Or, as Popper puts it, we can
only make ‘mistakes’ as quickly and cleverly as possible (Popper 1963, p. 1), which
means in this case, and as noted earlier, identifying dead-ends as soon as we can, as
well as trying as many new ideas as possible in the hope that something sticks. Per-
haps, for example, we run experiments on anti-elite and anti-inequality democratic
systems that could easily be upscaled, such as Prinz and Westphal’s proposal for a
Roman-style democratic ‘tribunate’ (Prinz and Westphal 2024). Or perhaps we run
experiments on innovations already being tried in political practice, as found within
new political parties and social movements (Della Porta 2020; Stockman and Scalia
2020). Think here, say, of the online voting platform called ‘Rousseau’ launched
by Italy’s Five Star Movement (Cozzaglio 2022), or ongoing proposals for ‘digital
democracy’ in the UK’s House of Commons.5 In each case we can run experiments
on such procedures in small-group settings, and then nd out, for instance: do any of
them produce more sustained engagement on the part of those involved? Do some
5 See this ocial statement on the issue: h t t p s : / / w w w . p a r l i a m e n t . u k / g l o b a l a s s e t s / d o c u m e n t s / s p e a k e r / d i g i
t a l - d e m o c r a c y / E l e c t o r a l R e f o r m S o c i e t y . p d f .
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J. Floyd
variants of them work better than others? Do some variants work well on some levels
but not at others? And so on and so forth.
Either way, we run as many experiments as possible, as fast as possible, and
involving as many people as possible, rather than just relying on a few theorists or a
few old ideas, let alone just the ideas we started with, or nd ‘buried’ in our favou-
rite ‘canonical’ texts. Sometimes, maybe we get lucky, and arrive quickly at ‘good’
data, meaning that we can move quickly from local campuses to local councils and
beyond. At other times, it will be one mistake after another, despite the urgency of
whatever ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ we hope to ease through institutional reform.
Is it Self-Correcting? Behavioural Experiments Defended and
Developed
There is at least one major worry here untouched by the discussion so far: how exactly
do we evaluate these experiments, if and when they happen? Do we, for example,
following the various references to ‘engagement’, treat procedural principles as
more successful when they produce higher participation levels from those involved,
including a propensity to come back for later iterations? Or, following the refences
to ‘anger’ and ‘polarisation’, do we treat them as more successful when those taking
part stay calm as well as connected? Or, following the references to body language,
do we say instead that successful experiments are simply those in which people stay
in the room without tearing the room apart?
Although each of these measures is tempting, there are still two points more fun-
damental than any of them. First, if these experiments are to be collaborative, then
we need to leave open dierent ways in which they can be measured, according to
the interests of those involved, by which mean I both planners and participants. Sec-
ond, if they are to be cumulative, then we need to leave open the possibility that new
measures will be thought of as the process develops, in place after place, year after
year, and on one issue after another. So, rather than thinking of ourselves here, as we
usually do, as Plato’s ‘Philosopher Kings’, think instead of Locke’s ‘Democratic-
underlabourers’. Our role is to work as ‘public political philosophers’, by helping our
fellow citizens to have conversations which they might not otherwise have, and by
looking for ways of having those conversations which they might not otherwise have
considered (Floyd 2024).
Does this though really solve the problem, given that we do at least need to make
choices about which experiments to run rst, and thus again how to evaluate them
when deciding what to run second, and so on and so forth? Bear in mind though the
numbers involved. We do not want just one experimenter, working on their own,
and then setting down rules, like Moses, for all who come after. What we want is
lots of people running lots of experiments in any way they see t. Provided they are
testing in some way procedural political principles and provided they are observing
the behaviour that interests them, then that is enough, or at least it will be enough
provided that they also share the results with everyone else. Naturally we start wor-
rying about such criteria when thinking about which team gets to set them up and on
what basis, but we are not talking here about just one ‘lab’ in Wuhan or Washington.
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Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical
Here we want something more like Wikipedia: collaborative, cumulative, diverse,
and open-ended over time.
What though if this ‘solution’, in truth, takes us from the frying pan to the re?
After all, even if it did solve those worries about bias and agenda-setting implied in
the initial question, might we now be digging an ever deeper hole, given the tendency
most of us have to cherry-pick cases according to causes? Consider, for example,
familiar ‘progressive’ or least ‘liberal’ attitudes on several contemporary issues: wel-
coming evidence on the failure of the ‘war on drugs’ whilst ignoring the growing
opioid crisis; welcoming ‘negative’ climate data whilst ignoring ‘positive’ geneti-
cally modied crop trials; welcoming evidence of diversity’s value in the workplace,
whilst ignoring ‘backlash’ evidence on political solidarity; welcoming successful
four-day working week trials, or UBI ‘experiments’, whilst ignoring failures as just
another chance to change the formula. And yes, you could pick all sorts of examples
here, from dierent points of view, but the key point would remain: if this tendency
towards conformation bias holds, whereby we nd proof in success and second-
chances in failures, then you may as well not have run these experiments at all.
This then is the stage in the argument where we need to stress, more than any-
where else, the importance of taking experiments seriously. You need to be prepared
to change and abandon old ideas. You need to be prepared to take on the views of
others. You need to accept being one experimenter amongst many, and that as a result
the ideas which you need might turn out to come from unexpected places. What
if, for example, whilst working at an elite Western institution, you hear that Chi-
nese scholars have found a procedural form of ‘social credit’ that enables maximal
political buy-in, in democratic-deliberative settings, on eective climate change poli-
cies? What if, whilst working at a public university, you hear that a tech company
has found the key to reducing factionalism in online policy debates (Floyd 2023a)?
Or, to come at just one issue from two dierent sides, what if you heard that either
a worker’s tribunate or repeated referendums provided the smoothest path through
wage disputes?
In any case, the point is that our role, as experimental political philosophers, is to
go wherever the ideas take us, by testing and rening them further, as well as spell-
ing out what their institutional equivalents would look like, and in turn how those
equivalents could be further experimented on in further up-scaled trials. That means
more teaming up than we are used to, as well as more letting go. It also means making
both philosophy and politics not just places where we push our arguments as hard as
we can, in the hope that they help others, but also places where we listen and learn,
knowing that others might help us more.
Acknowledgements Special thanks here go to Manon Westphal for many conversations and emails on
this topic, most of which took place as part of our ongoing research grant application on the same theme
as this article. Further thanks go to Janosh Prinz and Alice Baderin, each of whom also gave valuable time
to talk through the ideas in person, as well as three anonymous reviewers working for this journal, each
of whom gave excellent feedback. Final thanks go to those who took part in an ECPR-funded workshop
on ‘Experimental’ Political Theory at Roskilde University in 2023, hosted by Sune Lægaard, as well as
those involved, in the same year, in an ECPR Joint-Sessions Workshop organised by Svenja Ahlhaus and
Janosch Prinz on how to combine ‘Analytical’ and ‘Critical’ Political Theory.
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J. Floyd
Declarations
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit h t t p : / / c r e a t i v e c o m m o n s . o r g / l i c e n
s e s / b y / 4 . 0 / .
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