Advantages, Challenges and Limitations of Audit Experiments with Constituents
| Author | Nick Vivyan,Neil Visalvanich,Patrick Michael Kuhn,Gidon Cohen,Kyriaki Nanou,Florian Foos,Sarah Cohen,Daniel Bischof |
| DOI | 10.1177/14789299211037865 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Experiments with Politicians: Ethics, Power, and the Boundaries of Political Science |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211037865
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) 192 –200
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211037865
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Advantages, Challenges
and Limitations of Audit
Experiments with Constituents
Daniel Bischof1, Gidon Cohen2,
Sarah Cohen3, Florian Foos4,
Patrick Michael Kuhn5, Kyriaki Nanou5,
Neil Visalvanich5 and Nick Vivyan5
Abstract
Audit experiments examining the responsiveness of public officials have become an increasingly
popular tool used by political scientists. While these studies have brought significant insight into
how public officials respond to different types of constituents, particularly those from minority
and disadvantaged backgrounds, audit studies have also been controversial due to their frequent
use of deception. Scholars have justified the use of deception by arguing that the benefits of audit
studies ultimately outweigh the costs of deceptive practices. Do all audit experiments require the
use of deception? This article reviews audit study designs differing in their amount of deception.
It then discusses the organizational and logistical challenges of a UK study design where all
letters were solicited from MPs’ actual constituents (so-called confederates) and reflected those
constituents’ genuine opinions. We call on researchers to avoid deception, unless necessary, and
engage in ethical design innovation of their audit experiments, on ethics review boards to raise
the level of justification of needed studies involving fake identities and misrepresentation, and on
journal editors and reviewers to require researchers to justify in detail which forms of deception
were unavoidable.
Keywords
ethics, field experiment, audit study, UK politics
Accepted: 15 July 2021
1 Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, DK & Department of Political Science,
University of Zurich, Zurich, CH
2Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK
3Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
4Department of Government, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
5School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK
Corresponding author:
Patrick Michael Kuhn, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham DH1
3TU, UK.
Email: p.m.kuhn@durham.ac.uk
1037865PSW0010.1177/14789299211037865Political Studies ReviewBischof et al.
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