Abstract
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.
Highlights
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 motivation for our international collaboration is to examine the connection between citizens and their elected representatives in the context of partisan dealignment (Dalton, 2016; Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000; Mair, 2013), where the linkage role played by political parties is diminished
The direct link between citizens and their elected representatives is apparent in first past the post single member constituency systems (Hanretty et al, 2017), such as the one that operates in British General Elections, but it is a feature to some extent of all representative democracies (Carey and Shugart, 1995)
Summary
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. 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. The public criticism of our study largely focused on four issues: namely that we were wasting MPs and their staffs’ valuable time; in the middle of a global pandemic; using deception and that our methods were unlikely to yield significant results. Linked to these concerns were questions as to whether, and how, we had received ethical approval for the research.
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