A new experimental technique has been developed to study the electrokinetic lift force acting on an electrically charged particle moving parallel to a surface in a polar liquid, It is based on the observation of the normal movement of a particle close to a wall in a wall shear flow. The experimental results show that the force increases with increasing shear rate and decreasing solution conductivity. These findings are consistent with previously reported data and confirm the existence of an electrokinetic lift force that is difficult to detect because of its small magnitude, The experimental results are compared with various theoretical predictions, The comparisons show that the lift force calculated by most electrokinetic theories is not correct, Two new recently developed theories were applied to interpret the data, and reasonably good agreement with experimental results was found.