Social scientists should adopt higher transparency standards to improve the quality and credibility of research.

Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists over the last twenty years. Many scholars in political behavior, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue (inter alia) that most people dislike politics, and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large, representative samples investigating people's hypothetical willingness to deliberate and their actual behavior in response to a real invitation to deliberate with their member of Congress, we find: 1) that willingness to deliberate in the U.S. is much more widespread than expected; and 2) that it is precisely people who are less likely to participate in traditional partisan politics who are most interested in deliberative participation. They are attracted to such participation as a partial alternative to "politics as usual." 1 Deliberative democracy has entered a kind of adolescence. Many of the broad questions emerging from its infancy have been explored extensively, so that we know much more about both deliberation's potential and its limits than we did a decade ago. That being said, the future is still quite open, especially in matters of how deliberation can work in practice. There are still purely theoretical questions remaining, to be sure, but many of the big advances in our understanding of deliberation are likely to come through carefully aligning normative and empirical inquiry in a way that allows the two to speak to each other in mutually interpretable terms (Thompson, 2008: 16; Neblo, 2005: 170).In that spirit, we propose to start at the beginning: rather than focusing on the content of applied deliberation, we analyze who is willing to engage in deliberation in the first place. We pose the question as "Who is willing to deliberate?" rather than simply "Who deliberates?" 1 Our question is pertinent since some deliberative democrats claim that people would deliberate more if we gave them better opportunities. Cook et. al. (2007: 33), for example, found that "85% of those who said they had not attended a meeting to discuss public issues reported they had never been invited to do so." Many scholars of political behavior are skeptical that more opportunities will make a difference, believing that people simply do not want to deliberate (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002). If the deliberative democrats are right, however, then the two questions are crucially distinct: current patterns of deliberation do not necessarily reflect how citizens would participate given more attractive opportunities. Thus we broaden our focus beyond current levels of deliberation in the mass public, and the characteristics of those who already engage in it without being offered novel opportunities. We expand our inquiry to systematically investigate people's willingness to deliberate under varying conditions. We directly asked respondents how interested they would be in 1 "Who Deliberates?" is the title of two important pieces of...

Why and how do groups share information in politics? Most studies of information exchange in politics focus on individual-level attributes and implicitly assume that communication between any two policy actors is independent of the larger communication network in which they are embedded. We develop a theory stating that the decision of any lobbyist to inform another lobbyist is heavily conditioned upon their mutual relationships to third parties. We analyze over 40,000 dyadic relationships among lobbyists, government agencies, and congressional staff using sociometric data gathered in the 1970s health and energy policy domains. The results cohere with recent findings that lobbyists disproportionately inform those with similar preferences and show in addition that political communication is transitive: holding constant the degree of preference similarity, a lobbyist is more likely to communicate with another lobbyist if their relationship is brokered by a third party.

Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists, political scientists, activists, and even government officials. Many scholars, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue (inter alia) that most people dislike politics and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large national samples investigating people's hypothetical willingness to deliberate and their actual participation in response to a real invitation to deliberate with their member of Congress, we find that (1) willingness to deliberate in the United States is much more widespread than expected, and (2) it is precisely those people less likely to participate in traditional partisan politics who are most interested in deliberative participation. They are attracted to such participation as a partial alternative to “politics as usual.”

research question and the quality of the methodology, not whether the findings are positive, novel, and clean.More than 250 journals have adopted RRs since 2013 on the theorized promise of improving rigor and credibility. Initial evidence suggests that RRs are (1) effective at mitigating publication bias with a sharp increase in publishing negative results compared to the standard model 26,27 , and (2) cited as often or even more than other articles in the same journals 28 .However, there is no evidence about whether scholars perceive RRs to have higher, lower, or similar research quality compared with papers published in the standard model. The RR format could also have costs such as authors pursuing less interesting questions or conducting less novel or creative research 29,30 .We conducted an observational investigation of perceptions of the quality and importance of RRs compared to the standard model across a variety of outcome criteria. We recruited 353 researchers to each peer review a pair of papers, one from 29 RRs from psychology and neuroscience and one from 57 matched non-RR comparison papers.Comparison papers addressed similar topics, about half were by the same first or corresponding authors and about half were published in the same journal. RRs is a popular format for replication studies 3,31 , but replications are rare in the standard model so we excluded replication RRs. Researchers were assigned to papers according to their self-reported expertise based on the papers' keywords. Researchers self-reported that they were qualified to review the papers on average (N=353; RR M=3.74, SD=1.02; Comparison paper M=3.59, SD=1.07; Range 1 [not at all qualified] to 5 [substantially qualified]). Reviewers evaluated 19 outcome criteria including quality, rigor, novelty, creativity, and importance of the methodology and outcomes of the papers. In some RRs, authors submitted preliminary studies as initial evidence supporting the approach of the proposed last study that was peer reviewed before the findings were known. If Supplementary Table 10Article keywords included in the survey sample.