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In October 2014, flyers appeared in the mailboxes of Montanans that plotted where candidates for two nonpartisan state Supreme Court seats aligned ideologically compared to President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The flyers also included images of the Great Seal of Montana; the charge “Take this to the polls!”; and the statement, “This guide was created as part of a joint research project at Stanford and Dartmouth.” This unexpected campaign development caused confusion, including about how researchers could ethically inject themselves into the middle of an election (Johnson 2015a; McCulloch v. Stanford and Dartmouth 2015).
I was uniquely situated as an observer. I received the flyer in the mail and fielded numerous queries in Montana about why researchers from Stanford and Dartmouth would care about judicial elections in Montana. In February 2015, the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices (COPP), Jonathan Motl, recruited me to vet the ethics of the study. I had access to the investigative file that included, among other documents, written responses submitted by Stanford and Dartmouth to inquiries from the COPP; the IRB application from one of the researchers to the Dartmouth Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects for a prototype study in New Hampshire; and e-mails written by the researchers. The focus of this article is to suggest that the controversies surrounding the Montana flyer project demonstrate that standard IRB processes are not an adequate safeguard for protecting the broader community.
Political science field experiments reflect ethical challenges that current IRB practices, developed to protect individual subjects in research fields such as biomedicine, are not suited to review (Humphreys 2014). IRBs have chosen to adopt a narrow interpretation of the ethical principles of “respect, benefice, and justice” stated in the Belmont Report published in 1979 for the study of human subjects (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research 1979). The review process focuses on protection for individuals but generally excludes questions involving people in the aggregate (Desposato 2016; Teele 2014). The limitation may be reasonable for research conducted in the laboratory sciences; however, a political science field experiment about elections involves a different set of ethical concerns (Humphreys 2014).
Some warnings articulated by ethics scholars about field research in political science were...