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.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractIn this article we examine party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. We test their diering expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. We reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because we nd that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. We reject elite cue accounts, which argue that it is mainly the ideology of partisans that follows elite polarization, because we nd virtually identical trends for initially ideological similar non-partisans too. We thus nd support for an ideological polarization account where changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.

Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

Ahstract. With the gmwlh in inlcrest in collecti...e biography as II historical technique, many predominantly qualil31lve historialls find themi'>elves faced with large amounts of information. TheM: data. oollecud fmm a ...ariel)' of sources, are oflen highly ill't:¥u-1M, making U&liSlical analysis e:uremely problematic. Current pracli~is to ignore these problems and proceed with quantitative analysis suitable only (Of much more regular data. II is argued thai a mOfe satisfactory IIJl'PfUl'Ch is to ISI.-c:nain and direaly confl'Oflt the difficulties of analyzing such infonnalion. The three ccnlml problems are identified lIS missinlt wtll, systematic biu, and .he Jack of II; representlltive sllmph:. Using a practical example, the author explores the relationship bclwccn gender, the family, and political socialization within the Communist Party of Great Britain and~how! how each of the issues COJI be dealt with in tum. The author flU! distinguishe! truly missing datil from "negative informalion," which commonly appears to be missing ;n h;J;torical SOlIrcCIl. I-Ie then .stralifies the data to remove 5y~tematif; biltSCs relating to lhe issue al hand. Finally. he divides the~mple intodlffcrenl population.';, on the basis of the sources frolll which irttlividuuls life known, and compare~Ihe results otMained to cumint: whether his conclusions uppeW' to depend on quirh nf popuhuions contained in the sources. These idcas open a new range of sources to qU:lIllitalive analysis llnd l1IiSl: the possibility of allowing new type.~of evidence 10 count in historicul inquiry. Key,,-ords: Britain, Communist Pany, gendu. missing data. prosopogruphy I n 1998. almost 40 years after lhe much-heralded "quantitative revolution" in history began, the Jnrcrnotional Review of Social 1Jistory dedicated a supplement 10 introducing statistical and other social scientific techniques to an audience of social historians. lltis in itself is indicative of the foct that, outside of economic histOf)' and historical dcmogr'dphy. the anticipated torrelll of cliometric history had "simply failed to materialise" (Griffin