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Advantages, Challenges and Limitations of Audit Experiments with Constituents

Bischof, Daniel; Cohen, Gidon; Cohen, Sarah; Foos, Florian; Kuhn, Patrick Michael; Nanou, Kyriaki; Visalvanich, Neil; Vivyan, Nick

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Authors

Daniel Bischof

Florian Foos



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.

Citation

Bischof, D., Cohen, G., Cohen, S., Foos, F., Kuhn, P. M., Nanou, K., …Vivyan, N. (2022). Advantages, Challenges and Limitations of Audit Experiments with Constituents. Political Studies Review, 20(2), 192-200. https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211037865

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 15, 2021
Online Publication Date Aug 8, 2021
Publication Date May 1, 2022
Deposit Date Aug 9, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Political Studies Review
Print ISSN 1478-9299
Electronic ISSN 1478-9302
Publisher Political Studies Association
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 2
Pages 192-200
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211037865

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).





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