LISS Grant 2020 awarded to Robert Dur
Research fellow Robert Dur (Erasmus University) has been awarded a LISS Grant to conduct research on the topic of Policy Experimentation Aversion together with Benedetta Ricci (Erasmus University).
Proposals from nine researchers at ODISSEI member organisations were awarded the grant. Via the grant, the researchers will get access to free panel time. The LISS panel, managed by CentERdata, gives researchers access to survey data from about 7,000 respondents from approximately 4,500 households. Read more on the website of ODISSEI.
The project by Dur and Ricci studies people's opinions about policy experimentation. Among social scientists, there is broad agreement that policy experimentation can help governments to make better policy decisions. By introducing a new policy first on a small scale for a random selection of the target population, a lot can be learned about the effectiveness of the policy and possible side-effects. However, policy experimentation is often met with criticism and many politicians hesitate to propose it. Some politicians believe that voters massively oppose policy experimentation and do not propose it out of fear to lose elections. In this study, we aim to find out how people really think about policy experimentation.