Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T20:35:02.121Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Fisheries Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

David D. Laitin*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, 423 Encina Central, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044 e-mail: [email protected]

Extract

Both papers in this volume on which I was asked to comment (James E. Monogan III, “A Case for Registering Studies of Political Outcomes: An Application in the 2010 House Elections” and Macartan Humphreys, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, and Peter van der Windt, “Fishing, Commitment, and Communication: A Proposal for Comprehensive Nonbinding Research Registration”) advocate registration regimes for our discipline. The recommendations in both are incremental [promoting, as Lindblom (1965) might have said it, the “intelligence of research” and cognizant of the costs in scientific learning from such a regime if rigidly enforced. Moreover, both papers cite studies by Gerber and various co-authors (e.g., Gerber, Green, and Nickerson 2001) demonstrating publication bias in political science, incentivizing researchers to manipulate their regression models until they can show a z-statistic ≥ 1.96, and thereby reaching standard levels of significance. I fully accept that Gerber et al.'s papers have detected a serious flaw in our scientific practices; there is a problem to be solved. The Monogan and Humphreys et al. proposals are therefore worthy of consideration.

Type
Symposium on Research Registration
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boix, Carles. 2011. Democracy, development, and the international system. American Political Science Review 105(4): 809–28.Google Scholar
Boix, Carles, and Stokes, Susan. 2003. Endogenous democratization. World Politics 55: 517–49.Google Scholar
Casey, Katherine, Glennerster, Rachel, and Miguel, Edward. Forthcoming. Reshaping institutions: Evidence on aid impacts using a pre-analysis plan. Quarterly Journal of Economics.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., and Green, Donald P. 2012. Field experiments. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., Green, Donald P., and Nickerson, David. 2001. Testing for publication bias in political science. Political Analysis 9(4): 385–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humphreys, Macartan, Sanchez de la Sierra, Raul, and van der Windt, Peter. 2013. Fishing, commitment, and communication: A proposal for comprehensive nonbinding research registration. Political Analysis 21: 120.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Keohane, Robert, and Verba, Sidney. 1994. Designing social inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Charles. 1965. The intelligence of democracy. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Monogan, James E. III. 2013. A case for registering studies of political outcomes: An application in the 2010 House elections. Political Analysis 21: 2137.Google Scholar
Przeworski, Adam, Alvarez, Michael E., and Cheibub, José Antonio. 2000. Democracy and development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, Joseph P., Nelson, Leif D., and Simonsohn, Uri. 2011. False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allow presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science 22: 1359–66.Google Scholar