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This chapter talks about the significance of generalizability. Experimentalists often go to great lengths to argue that student or other convenience samples are not problematic in terms of external validity. Likewise, a convincing case for causality is often elusive with observational research, no matter how stridently one might argue to the contrary. The conventional wisdom is that experiments are widely valued for their internal validity, and experiments lack external validity. These assumptions are so widespread as to go without question in most disciplines, particularly those emphasizing external validity, such as political science and sociology. But observational studies, such as surveys, are still supposed to be better for purposes of maximizing external validity because this method allows studying people in real world settings.

This final chapter offers concluding thoughts about the courts' involvement with standards-based reform. It presents an overview and an analytical summary of the previous chapters to bring together the analyses presented throughout the book. It examines the implications of the analyses in this book against the backdrop of the courts' historical and more recent involvement with public law litigation in other fields. Based on these analyses, the chapter recommends an approach for the courts to take moving forward and discusses the limitations of this approach. Finally, it offers a few final words about the importance of attending to the courts' continuing role in education policy.

This chapter looks at the members of the Society in a wider context. It demonstrates the importance of the entire group for historians of 18th-century politics, industry, and society, as well as for historians of science. It shows how the membership of the Society reveals the complexity of philosophical connections in the 1780s. The connections among industrialists, experimentalists, and reformers are explored in two ways: by placing the Society amidst the general 18th-century development of coffee-house philosophers and by placing the Society among the many groups who met for ‘improving natural philosophy, by lecture, experiment, and discussion.’ The main nodes of the network revealed by the Society include Edinburgh University and Dr. Joseph Black, London hospitals, Birmingham industry, and the Watts and Wedgwoods.

This chapter commences the study of enforcement in Part II of the book. It examines the challenge of enforcement against the two poles of judicial usurpation and abdication. The first expresses the fear that judges will usurp the elected branches, by enforcing interpretations of economic and social rights that are neither democratically accountable nor competently devised. The second sees abdication of the judicial role, and the accompanying diminishing of all rights, to be the greater problem. This Chapter departs from these poles by demonstrating the variety of judicial review that accompanies economic and social rights. Drawing on examples from South Africa and the United States, it describes what it calls deferential, conservational, experimentalist, managerial, and peremptory stances of judicial review, which each present different responses to the interpretation of rights, the scrutiny of government, and the control of remedies. This typology is presented as a diagram

This chapter investigates how John Dewey’s naturalistic period is characterized by the substitution of ontological issues for the methodological ones that dominated the experimentalist phase. This change in emphasis resulted from his continued preoccupation with certain concerns that had marked his idealistic period, two of which are relevant here: the recognition that consciousness must be viewed as active as well as passive; and organicism. From William Morris, Dewey had come to appreciate the active role of intelligence in the acquisition of knowledge; and in G.W.F. Hegel, he had found a well-worked-out expression of organicism, a doctrine that had attracted him since his undergraduate years at the University of Vermont.

This chapter offers advice to experimentalists on the proper way to go about creating an experiment and publishing it. It emphasizes the fact that often, what is important about an experimental paper is the design and hypothesis being tested. The paper should be judged on the basis of the questions asked, and the design used to answer it, not on the basis of the results.

This chapter discusses a trend of “experimentalist” manumissions wherein emancipated slaves were sent to Liberia, then a colony under the supervision of the American Colonization Society (ACS). By carefully directing how the slaves were to be emancipated, transported to Liberia, and then supported there for a limited time, the slaves were buffered from the worst effects of the slave system—sale, relocation, and physical punishment. These experimentalists were also notable for committing themselves to keeping enslaved families together, as opposed to the common practice of dividing up the slaves among the deceased master's heirs. After the Civil War, many of the slaves in Liberia would find themselves emancipated a second time—from a conditional slavery that, unlike their first, would bring liberty to them and all their friends and family.

Transnational governance initiatives increasingly face the problem of regime complexity in which a proliferation of regulatory schemes operate in the same policy domain, supported by varying combinations of public and private actors. The literature suggests that such regime complexity can lead to forum-shopping and other self-interested strategies which undermine the effectiveness of transnational regulation. Based on the design principles of experimentalist governance, this chapter identifies a variety of pathways and mechanisms which promote productive interactions in regime complexes. We use the case of the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, interacting with private certification schemes and public legal timber regulations, including those of third countries such as the US and China, to demonstrate how an increasingly comprehensive transnational regime can be assembled by linking together distinct components of a regime complex.

This chapter provides context for disability and employment policy in the European Union (EU) by highlighting the key provisions of the EU’s founding treaties in these areas. It then outlines relevant aspects of the three EU-level strategies that together set out EU disability employment policy: hard law, or legislative intervention, requiring member states to ensure that certain specified requirements or standards are achieved by their domestic law; experimentalist governance, in the form of the Open Method of Co-ordination; and direct funding. Finally, the chapter identifies lessons that can be learned from the EU’s experience of harnessing these three different tools to achieve its strategic objectives and to consider the extent to which they might have relevance to the world beyond the rather unique parameters of the EU.

This chapter discusses Science and Technology Studies, actor-network theory (ANT), the current version of ANT (ANT 6.5), the performativity of the economy, commercialization, operations research (OR), and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) auctions. Actor-network theory has been promoted as a Theory of Everything and many attributes of it can be found in a relatively developed form in OR. The performativity thesis of Michel Callon has been considered as an important contribution to economic sociology, and in The Laws of the Markets, Callon claims that the economy is embedded in economics, not in society. In 1994, the FCC started the practice of auctioning communications spectrum licenses to the highest bidder and game theorists recruited by the FCC conceptualized an auction as a Bayesian learning game. Game theorists pursue the criterion of ex post Pareto optimality, whereas experimentalists pursue ex ante Pareto optimality.

This chapter reviews the book Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (2010), by Joanna Picciotto. Picciotto offers a new and creative interpretation of the literature in, and surrounding, the experimentalist tradition in England. In particular, she tackles the association between objectivity and innocent experience and the experimentalists' attempt to restore innocent insight by identifying collectively with Adam. Picciotto explores how the concept of the labourer in her imitatio Adami tradition emerged, and how it influenced the ‘intellectual as public worker’. She argues that this ‘intellectual labor’ performed by the ‘spectatorial body’ was as much a product of ‘Protestant ideas’ as ‘Baconian ideology’.

This chapter examines the British misinterpretation of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. It analyzes why the British misinterpreted the Civil War and why they failed to understand the essence of Lincoln's character and strategy. It suggests that the British responses to the Civil War were influenced largely by social position and class consciousness. This chapter also discusses the view of Lincoln as a pragmatist and “an experimentalist” who found different ways to advance chosen objectives and the importance of the long pamphlet published by the young Leslie Stephen at the beginning of 1865 titled The “Times” on the American War: A Historical Study.

Curiously, early neoclassical economics was a theory of agents, not markets as such. But changes in markets in the late twentieth century began to highlight this lacuna. How information was incorporated into the theory began to suggest that economists could not just describe The Market, but could also design boutique markets for clients. We trace the resulting narrative trajectory of this epoch-making departure using an abstract Information Space graphic showing combinations of types of agent epistemology, with different types of models of information.

This chapter introduces the concept of transnational bribery law, as well as the associated anti-bribery regime, and describes both the dominant approach to its design and an important critique. Transnational bribery law is defined by four questions: What types of conduct should be targeted? Which actors ought to be considered complicit? What sanctions ought to be imposed? Who should bear the benefits and burdens of imposing those sanctions? The dominant approach to these questions can be called the OECD paradigm. That paradigm generally presumes that legal institutions outside the state whose official has been bribed ought to prohibit a broad range of conduct, target a wide range of actors, impose severe sanctions, and involve as many agencies as possible in enforcement. The anti-imperialist critique challenges the OECD paradigm in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, fairness, due process, and legitimacy. An inclusive experimentalist approach offers a way to reconcile these competing views.

Modern transnational bribery law has spread beyond the United States and has developed into a complex, decentralized, dynamic, and global “anti-bribery regime.” These developments were prompted by lobbying on the part of the United States and members of civil society. The emergence of the new regime was marked by the adoption of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and the UN Convention against Corruption, as well as several other international instruments. This chapter describes the legal instruments that underpin the regime. It also surveys the institutions that implement the regime and the efforts that have been undertaken to monitor levels of enforcement, the incidence of bribery, and the impact of transnational bribery law. It concludes by asking whether the current anti-bribery regime qualifies as an example of global experimentalist governance.

This chapter offers a theoretical interpretation of Europe’s democratic challenge and a set of tentative prescriptions on Europe’s institutional architecture and representative legitimacy through the lens of demoicratic theory. The chapter provides the main building blocks of such a demoicratic theory and analyses similarities and differences with frameworks such as compound democracy, multilevel governance, and experimentalist governance. It then sets out to argue that the democratic principles identified by the overall project—namely delegation, accountability, representation, responsiveness, and participation—require a considerable reinterpretation if we are to move away from statist interpretations of the European Union and appraise it as ‘a union of peoples who govern together, but not as one’. This chapter consequently develops the argument for European demoicracy from a positive and normative perspective and analyses points of overlap as well as divergence with other perspectives in the book.