In this article, I develop a critical view of the development and state of research ethics in political science. The central problem is that political scientists have inappropriately followed the lead of clinical biomedical research ethics in thinking about their own designs. Specifically I argue that the focus on institutional and group decision-making contexts distinctive to political research presents normative problems not well-addressed by clinical biomedical approaches. First, I make the case that research ethics as it has been conceived won’t capture all that might be wrong in political research designs because some of the potential harms/wrongs will be to political norms and institutions and thus will violate political (although not individual ethical) rights/values/and so on. Second, I rebut the challenge that principles of justice and equipoise standard to biomedical research ethics might be suitable for political research. And third, I argue that political theorists and philosophers must involve themselves in empirical political science research ethics if we are to effectively communicate the stakes of these research designs to practitioners, consumers, funders, and editors who remain steeped in the norms of biomedical research ethics.

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Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. But political actors do things – they engage in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion, yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely because they serve to purposively alter citizens’ beliefs, intentions and behaviour. With this article, I explicate a conception of political manipulation to capture this sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of democratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power.

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