“Sign-congruence, External Validity, and Replication,” Tara Slough (NYU) and Scott Tyson (Emory)

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Abstract: We develop a framework for accumulating evidence across studies and apply it to understand the theoretical foundations of replication. We focus on two ways of assessing empirical results across studies: target-equivalence, where empirical targets across studies are the same, and target-congruence, where empirical targets’ sign is the same across studies. Our results show how each of these assessment criteria are related to distinct formulations of external validity. We stress the importance of holding aspects of a research design fixed across settings when accumulating evidence across studies, which ensures that questions of external validity can be addressed using replication.

Tara Slough is an Assistant Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. She writes on the political economy of institutions and development. Her current research focuses on the comparative study of bureaucracies and on research design. Tara’s recent work appears in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. Tara recently earned a PhD from Columbia University.

Scott Tyson is an associate professor at Emory University, department of Quantitative Theory and Methods. His research focuses on formal political theory, political economy, conflict, authoritarian politics, experimental design, and theoretical implications of empirical models. He is an Associate Editor for formal theory at Political Science Research & Methods, the Journal of the European Political Science Association.

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This series is sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.