Forschung als soziales Dilemma: Eine meta-wissenschaftliche Bestandsaufnahme zur Glaubwürdigkeit politikwissenschaftlicher Befunde und ein Appell zur Veränderung akademischer Anreizstrukturen

Abstract

This is an uncorrected pre-print. Please cite the original article. Witnessing the ongoing "credibility revolutions" in other disciplines, also political science should engage in meta-scientific introspection. Theoretically, this commentary describes why scientists in academia's current incentive system work against their self-interest if they prioritize research credibility. Empirically, a comprehensive review of meta-scientific research with a focus on quantitative political science demonstrates that threats to the credibility of political science findings are systematic and real. Yet, the review also shows the discipline's recent progress toward more credible research. The commentary proposes specific institutional changes to better align individual researcher rationality with the collective good of verifiable, robust, and valid scientific results.

When the Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Populist Attitudes and Other Multidimensional Constructs

“…This approach is particularly appealing if the cutoff points have informational value (e.g., above the mean or at the scale midpoint). Yet obvious cutoff points are often unavailable, which leads to an increased risk of inducing arbitrary choices or misuse of analytical discretion (Wuttke 2019). More fundamentally, human evaluations of any given entity usually differ by degree.…”

The pleasure principle

“…Based on simulated responses on the survey questionnaire, an analysis pipeline was pre-preregistered, see https://osf.io/24xyq and Supplement 6. The analysis pipeline contains all data processing steps and pre-specifies the data analysis, thereby largely eliminating researchers' degree of freedom (Wuttke, 2019). Deviations from the preregistered analysis pipeline that became necessary after data collection due to errors in the original scripts are documented in Supplement 7.…”

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

“…The area of immigration and social policy research, like most any interdisciplinary field dependent on secondary data from macro-comparative surveys, is an ideal setting to discuss some persistent problems of science. By now, members of the public, policymakers and a growing number of social scientists are aware of the crisis of science (Delfanti 2010;Saltelli and Funtowicz 2017;Wuttke 2018). Experimental sciences were hit particularly hard by this crisis, but statistics in general and secondary data analysis in the social sciences suffers as well.…”