Replication Data for: Ethics in elite experiments. A perspective of officials and voters

Political elites act as extremely relevant subjects for political science experiments. However, due to the limited pool of politicians, researchers express concern that experimental research alienates said politicians from future participation in studies. We present the first empirical investigation of how politicians and citizens regard elite experiments. Results show that survey experiments as such are not perceived as being particularly problematic. Instead, both officials and citizens rank other issues as being more problematic, such as when survey answers fail to be analyzed or when scholars fail to report their results. However, we find that politicians are somewhat more concerned with research ethics than are citizens, which indicates that researchers should not assume that politicians “can take more”. We also find that the perceptions of research ethics vary between politicians, and note that future research should take this into account in order to ensure both higher participation and a greater trust in researchers.