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Data Access, Transparency, and Replication: New Insights from the Political Behavior Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2018

Daniel Stockemer ,
Sebastian Koehler  and
Tobias Lentz
Daniel Stockemer
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
Sebastian Koehler
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz
Tobias Lentz
Affiliation:
Statistical Research Office in Hesse, Germany
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Abstract

Do researchers share their quantitative data and are the quantitative results that are published in political science journals replicable? We attempt to answer these questions by analyzing all articles published in the 2015 issues of three political behaviorist journals (i.e., Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties)—all of which did not have a binding data-sharing and replication policy as of 2015. We found that authors are still reluctant to share their data; only slightly more than half of the authors in these journals do so. For those who share their data, we mainly confirmed the initial results reported in the respective articles in roughly 70% of the times. Only roughly 5% of the articles yielded significantly different results from those reported in the publication. However, we also found that roughly 25% of the articles organized the data and/or code so poorly that replication was impossible.

Type
Articles
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 799 - 803
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

In the original publication of this article, Tobias Lentz’s name was misspelled. The article has been updated to correct this error.

References

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