The Ethics Chill: Human Participant Research in Canadian Political Science Doctoral Theses under TCPS

Abstract Beginning in 1998 under the first Tri Council Policy Statement (TCPS 1), Canadian political science has been increasingly subject to standardized institutional ethics review for work involving human participants. Some contend that this ethics regime has overburdened the social sciences with clinically-oriented and legally risk-averse processes. In turn, this may create an ethics chill that pushes social scientists, particularly graduate students, away from human participant research. To date, however, there has been no empirical demonstration of this phenomenon within political science. Has Canadian institutional research ethics review under TCPS chilled human participant-driven research production in political science doctoral theses? This article tests the ethics chill hypothesis using an original dataset of English and French political science PhD dissertations across 11 Canadian universities from 1990 to 2019. Its results suggest no concrete evidence of an ethics chill under TCPS.