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A Quantitative Method for Substantive Robustness Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2014

Abstract

Empirical political science is not simply about reporting evidence; it is also about coming to conclusions on the basis of that evidence and acting on those conclusions. But whether a result is substantively significant––strong and certain enough to justify acting upon the belief that the null hypothesis is false––is difficult to objectively pin down, in part because different researchers have different standards for interpreting evidence. Instead, this article advocates judging results according to their “substantive robustness,” the degree to which a community with heterogeneous standards for interpreting evidence would agree that the result is substantively significant. This study illustrates how this can be done using Bayesian statistical decision techniques. Judging results in this way yields a tangible benefit: false positives are reduced without decreasing the power of the test, thus decreasing the error rate in published results.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

Justin Esarey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892, USA ([email protected]). Nathan Danneman is Data Scientist, L-3 Data Tactics, 7901 Jones Branch Dr. No. 700, McLean, VA, USA ([email protected]). This research was supported in part by a University Research Committee grant from Emory University. We thank Bill Berry, Jeff Staton, Tom Clark, Drew Linzer, Emily Ritter, John Gasper, Stu Jordan, Tim Salmon, David Siegel, Jackie DeMeritt, Deirdre McCloskey, Andrew Martin and respondents at presentations of this research at Emory University, Florida State University, Georgia State University, the University of Rochester, the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology, the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, and the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association for helpful comments and criticism. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2014.14.

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