Hyde on New Replication Initiative in Political Science

Susan Hyde, Associate Professor of Political Science and ISPS Resident Faculty Fellow, and Thad Dunning (UC Berkeley and former ISPS Fellow), blogged on the Monkey Cage earlier this month about replication in political science.

“If incentives are improved, important studies can be replicated across contexts, and enough scholars may be willing to build in additional research time to coordinate across studies such that their work better contributes to the accumulation of knowledge.”

Hyde and Dunning write about a new “regranting” initiative by Experiements in Government and Politics (EGAP) and UC Berkeley’s Center on the Politics of Development (CPD), in which

“…regrantees will be expected to make their data public in order to give others the opportunity to replicate the findings within each study before publication. This opportunity for “internal” replication should reveal errors or discrepancies in the data, increasing the chance of reliable findings. This is important because published studies are too often based on data that cannot be internally replicated, implying that results and findings generated could, in fact, be incorrect.”