Political Studies Review

This introduction sets out the context for this symposium, which is the discontent expressed by UK MPs and the Speaker of the House of Commons in March 2021 about a research project using e-mails from fictitious constituents to audit the responsiveness of legislators to constituent emails. The article reviews the research literature on experiments on politicians and summarises the debate in the academy about the ethical conduct of these randomised controlled trials. Contributors to the symposium defend and challenge approaches to carrying out these elite experiments, whether using fictitious identities, confederates, and/or partnerships with politicians, as well as refine a cost-benefit approach to the design of these studies.

This article reviews the issues raised by the reaction to an audit experiment, studying the responsiveness of British MPs to their constituents, in November and December 2020. The experiment was part of a wider comparative project investigating the linkage between legislators and their constituents. We sent two short emails to all MPs asking how they and their party were going to respond to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were required by our ethics committee to debrief the subjects, providing the opportunity to withdraw from the analysis. The scale of the reaction to the debriefing email was neither desired nor anticipated (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56196967). We explain how we got ourselves into such difficulty, how we might have stayed out of it and the wider implications of our experience for experimental research on politicians. We reflect on the ethical issues raised by the reaction to our research, alongside the role that communications with legislators, the wider parliamentary community and the media should play in research design when conducting experiments with politicians as subjects.

This essay contemplates experiences from four national ethics audits designed to facilitate correspondence study field experiments with national politicians in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom. The experimental study aims to reveal possible biases in legislators’ responsiveness to distinct types of constituents such as non-partisans, lower-class constituents, ethnic minorities, and women, and to unveil possible unsubstantiated fears or misperceptions in this regard. The national research teams proposed the same experimental design but received three different ethical evaluations. Specifically, the relevant Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the UK and Denmark asked for two different de-briefing procedures. In the Danish case, this led to withdrawal of the experiment due to severe costs with regard to research quality. In the UK case, it led to increased risk of backlash. Our experiences imply a need for more consistent ethics regimes in the European research community designed to facilitate comparative social science research.

We examine compensation as a tool to encourage the thoughtful use of audit experimentation. If researchers had to compensate subjects or communities, they would be more likely to avoid excessively large studies and to only conduct high-value studies. We build on Desposato and propose that when conducting an audit study, (1) researchers donate time or money to the communities potentially affected by the study, (2) researchers preregister this donation, and (3) researchers provide evidence of the donation they made in publication and presentation.

The audit study design offers researchers a powerful tool to measure discrimination. Yet ethical concerns surround the use of this design. In this article, we introduce a cost–benefit framework that researchers should consider when conducting audit studies. One key insight of this framework is that when researchers evaluate audit studies due to ethical concerns, they must also evaluate the relative benefits of studying discrimination through other means. Building on this framework, we provide a set of practical recommendations that researchers can adopt to (1) minimize costs (i.e. ethical harm) and (2) maximize benefits (i.e. quality of their research). We hope that our suggestions contribute to the ongoing, important discussion about ethical issues involving audit studies and generate better work on discrimination.

What are the potential harms from elite audit experiments? Such studies seem genuinely harmless and all in a day’s work for elites. In addition, such studies may provide valuable information about elites’ performance and service to their publics. However, there are a number of potential harms of such studies which are generally not captured by the standard human subjects framework. In this essay, I consider the various harms that can result from excessive experimentation on elites. I identify several previously ignored public harms, including aggregate and response delay harms. I offer several potential strategies to assuage and avoid these harms.

This essay discusses the history and ethics of academics’ intervention in the legislative process. Academics, and even our professional associations, have explicitly worked to change legislative operations through advocacy and consulting. I argue that subjecting such interventions to the research process to evaluate their effects makes them more ethical and transparent. Research is monitored and guided by professional associations, institutional review boards, and journals in ways that advocacy and consulting are not. If academics are already intervening in legislative processes, such efforts will be more fruitful if conducted as part of a research program. This program, which I call “evidence-based legislating,” aims to improve the evaluation of legislative processes just as the movement for evidence-based policymaking reshaped academics’ and lawmakers’ approach to policy evaluation.

Based on experience of over 1000 interviews with British members of parliament, this article explains why members of parliament are difficult to get access to; offers tips to gain access to them, as well as ideas for how to get the most of out of them once they have agreed. It sets out one Golden Rule of dealing with political elites and also discusses the problems of attempting surveys.

Experimental research by political scientists on elites has grown dramatically in recent years. Experimenting on and with elites raises important questions, both practical and ethical. Elites are busy people, doing important work under public scrutiny. Therefore, any experiments that use up political elites’ time, risk impairing their ability to do their jobs as well as possible, or put at risk the larger research community’s access to elites should be avoided. Nevertheless, despite these risks and challenges, we argue experimenting with elites has enough benefits both to the research community and to elites themselves, that it should still be done. The relevant question then becomes how should we think about doing experiments with political elites? We propose a framework of value-added and transparent experiments. Our framework is guided by the following two simple rules: Elite subjects should individually benefit from the process of doing the experiment. It should add value to their role as representatives. Second, the identity of the researchers and purposes of the experiment should be transparent. As we argue, these two combined features can still accommodate a large range of experiments, can creatively spark researchers to think up new designs and can protect access to elites for future research. We review two such examples at the end of this essay.

The ideational power framework developed by Carstensen and Schmidt has sought to make explicit the manner in which ideas can exert an influence over policy outcomes. However, one key feature of this theoretical framework has not yet been adequately conceptualised: the communicative process through which policy entrepreneurs convey their ideas to the general public. This article focuses on one specific form of communicative discourse as a means of generating widespread public support for a given policy proposal: public discourse via the media – be it print, broadcast or social media. We argue that the ideational power literature should recognise the media as a powerful entity in its own right rather than merely depicting the media as an implement for political communication. We contend that the ideational power framework could usefully incorporate a characterisation of the media that has recently emerged from political communications research: the hybrid media system. In order to illustrate how the communicative process inherent in ideational power can be understood in terms of a hybrid media system, we undertake a comparative review of two empirical studies which assess political discourse during the 2016 US presidential election from the perspectives of ideational power and hybrid media systems.

What accounts for the varying and increasing levels of centralisation in federal systems? This article contributes to this debate showing that, despite normative and theoretical arguments on the advantages of decentralised fiscal federalism, changing economic conditions and governance hurdles prompt an increasing trend towards executive fiscal centralisation. It seeks to unravel this theoretical riddle by proposing the concept of delegative federalism, defined as a model of federal governance suitable for explaining how economic contexts impel a dynamic of subnational assent to centralisation policies and reforms that oftentimes breach the historic institutional empowerment of subnational authorities. The experience of Argentina, a paradigmatic case of hyper-presidentialist federalism amid institutionally strong provinces, is analysed to show that national executives may increasingly extend their reach not only because of congressional dysfunction but also due to the disproportionate sway of overrepresented, mostly transfer-dependent subnational governments that shun revenue responsibility. Accordingly, and perpetuating centralisation, they delegate tax authority in crises times and abdicate it further when economic windfall affords them with predictable federal grants.

Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies.

We assess Dugan and Chenoweth’s Rational Choice-based argument regarding moderating effects of indiscriminate conciliatory state actions on levels of terrorist attacks in Israel-Palestine, utilizing data drawn primarily from declassified security records on Israeli state actions during the First Intifada (1987–1992). This type of data source, we argue, contains a more accurate ratio of conciliatory to repressive actions than Dugan and Chenoweth’s media-based data, given state authorities’ attempts at concealing repressive actions while publicizing conciliatory actions during times of intense conflict. We discuss differences in results—including, most centrally, no support for the hypothesized effect of conciliatory state actions—highlighting the theoretical payoffs of examining the Political Process–related factor of varying levels of state control over the political environment.

Gender gaps in voter turnout are usually studied using opinion surveys rather than official census data. This is because administrative censuses usually do not disaggregate turnout according to voters’ sex. Without this official information, much of the research on gender gaps in electoral turnout relies on survey respondents’ self-reported behavior, either before or after an election. The decision to use survey data implies facing several potential drawbacks. Among them are the turnout overstatement bias and the attrition or nonresponse bias, both affecting the estimation of factors explaining turnout and any related statistical analysis. Furthermore, these biases may be correlated with covariates such as gender: men, more than women, may systematically overstate their electoral participation. We analyze turnout gender gaps in Chile, comparing national surveys with official administrative data, which in Chile are publicly available. Crucially, the latter includes the official record of sex, age, and the electoral behavior—whether the individual voted or not—for about 14 million registered individuals. Based on a series of statistical models, we find that analysis based on survey data is likely to rule out gender gaps in electoral participation. Carrying out the same exercises, but with official data, leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that there is a sizable gender gap favoring women.

Politicians’ individual traits can influence policy outcomes. A local mayor has authority over the budget process and can affect the municipal budget allocation. This study empirically examined whether the mayor’s gender affected the gendered budget in Korean cities between 2016 and 2020. Across various econometric designs, our results revealed little evidence that mayoral gender (women, in this case) affects the formulation and execution of the gendered budget. The results imply that the effects of female representation through a female leader are dependent on various socioeconomic contexts.