Student-led replication studies in comparative politics: new findings by fresh eyes?

Abstract

This research note presents two replication studies that were conducted during a research-oriented course at Heidelberg University in summer 2022. The first study, initially conducted by Korell, replicates the findings from Albert’s original contribution on rebel governance. Albert conducted an explorative study in analyzing the associations between rebel governance and rebel military capacity. Our replication study indicates support for Albert’s argument of the relevance of disaggregating rebel governance, while we also show that the original findings are mainly driven by Albert’s explorative model specifications. The second study, initially conducted by Reinecke, tests the robustness of Levin et al.’s study on the democratic peacekeeping hypothesis and expands upon the original study by directly testing the “selectorate-theoretic causal mechanism” for the democratic peacekeeping hypothesis. Overall, the replication studies presented in this research note provide interesting findings regarding empirical conflict studies and contribute to ongoing efforts to promote replication initiatives in the education of future political scientists.