Fisheries Management
In: Political analysis: PA ; the official journal of the Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, Volume 21, Issue 1, p. 42-47
ISSN: 1476-4989
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.
