## 13 October 2014

### Do Political Scientists Care About Effect Sizes: Replication and Type M Errors

Reproducibility has come a long way in political science since I began my PhD all the way back in 2008. Many major journals now require replication materials be made available either on their websites or some service such as the Dataverse Network.

This is certainly progress. But what are political scientists actually supposed to do with this new information? It does help avoid effort duplication--researchers don't need to gather data or program statistical techniques that have already been gathered or programmed. It promotes better research habits. It definitely provides ''procedural oversight''. We would be highly suspect of results from authors that were unable or unwilling to produce their code/data.

However, there are lots of problems that data/code availability requirements do not address. Apart from a few journals like Political Science Research and Methods, most journals have no standing policy to check the replication materials' veracity. Reviewers rarely have access to manuscripts' code/data. Even if they did have access to it, few reviewers would be willing or able to undertake the time consuming task of reviewing this material.

## Do political science journals care about coding and data errors?

What do we do if someone replicating published research finds clear data or coding errors that have biased the published estimates?

Note that I'm limiting the discussion here to honest mistakes, not active attempts to deceive. We all make these mistakes. To keep it simple, I'm also only talking about clear, knowable, and non-causal coding and data errors.

Probably the most responsible action a journal could take to finding clear cut coding/data biased results would be to directly adjoin to the original article a note detailing the bias. This way readers will always be aware of the correction and will have the best information possible. This is a more efficient way of getting out corrected information than relying on some probabilistic process where readers may or may not stumble upon the information posted elsewhere.

As far as I know, however, no political science journal has a written procedure (please correct me if I'm wrong) for dealing with this new information. My sense is that there are a series of ad hoc responses that closely correspond to how the bias affects the results:

### Statistical significance

The situation where a journal is most likely to do anything is when correcting the bias makes the results no longer statistically significant. This might get a journal to append a note to the original article. But maybe not, they could just ignore it.

### Sign

It might be that once the coding/data bias is corrected, the sign of an estimated effect flips--the result of what Andrew Gelman calls Type S errors. I really have no idea what a journal would do in this situation. They might append a note or maybe not.

### Magnitude

Perhaps the most likely outcome of correcting honest coding/data bias is that the effect size changes. These errors would be the result of Gelman's Type M errors. My sense (and experience) is that in a context where novelty is greatly privileged over facts journal editors will almost certainly ignore this new information. It will be buried.

## Do political scientists care about effect size?

Due to the complexity of what political scientists study, we rarely (perhaps with the exception of election forecasting) think that we are very close to estimating a given effect's real magnitude. Most researchers are aiming for statistical significance and a sign that matches their theory.

Does this mean that we don't care about trying to estimate magnitudes as closely as possible?

Looking at political science practice pre-publication, there is a lot of evidence that we do care about Type M errors. Considerable effort is given to finding new estimation methods that produce less biased results. Questions of omitted variable bias are very common at research seminars and in journal reviews. Most researchers do carefully build their data sets and code to minimise coding/data bias. Sure many of these efforts are focused on the headline stuff--whether or not a given effect is significant and what the direction of the effect is. But, and perhaps I'm being naive here, these efforts are also part of a desire to make the most accurate estimate of an effect as possible.

However, the review process and journals' responses to finding Type M errors caused by honest coding/data errors in published findings suggest that perhaps we don't care about effect size. Reviewers almost never look at code and data. Journals (as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong) never append information on replications that find Type M errors to original papers.

## Prescription

I have a simple prescription for demonstrating that we actually care about estimating accurate effect sizes:

Develop a standard practice of including a short authored write up of the data/code bias with corrected results in the original article's supplementary materials. Append a notice to the article pointing to this.

Doing this would not only give readers more accurate effect size estimates, but also make replication materials more useful.

Standardising the practice of publishing authored notes will incentivise people to use replication materials, find errors, and publicly correct them. Otherwise, researchers who use replication data and code will be replicating easy to correct errors.

## 22 July 2014

### Note to self: brew cleanup r

Note to self: after updating R with Homebrew remember to cleanup old versions:

brew cleanup r

Otherwise I'm liable to get a segfault. (see also)

## 28 June 2014

### Simple script from setting up R, Git, and Jags on Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Instance

Just wanted to put up the script I've been using to create an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance for running RStudio, Git, and Jags. There isn't anything really new in here, but it it has been serving me well.

The script begins after the basic instance has been set up in the Amazon EC2 console (yhat has a nice post on how to do this, though some of their screenshots are a little old). Just SSH into the instance and get started.

## 6 June 2014

### Slides for a simple introduction to Bayesian data analysis

Here is the slide deck from a simple introductory talk I gave yesterday on Bayesian data analysis:

## 11 May 2014

Over the past few months I’ve added a few improvements to the repmis–miscellaneous functions for reproducible research–R package. I just want to briefly highlight two of them:

• source_XlsxData for downloading data in Excel formatted files.

Both of these capabilities are in repmis version 0.2.9 and greater.

## Caching

When working with data sourced directly from the internet, it can be time consuming (and make the data hoster angry) to repeatedly download the data. So, repmis’s source functions (source_data, source_DropboxData, and source_XlsxData) can now cache a downloaded data set by setting the argument cache = TRUE. For example:

DisData <- source_data("http://bit.ly/156oQ7a", cache = TRUE)

When the function is run again, the data set at http://bit.ly/156oQ7a will be loaded locally, rather than downloaded.

To delete the cached data set, simply run the function again with the argument clearCache = TRUE.

## source_XlsxData

I recently added the source_XlsxData function to download Excel data sets directly into R. This function works very similarly to the other source functions. There are two differences:

• You need to specify the sheet argument. This is either the name of one specific sheet in the downloaded Excel workbook or its number (e.g. the first sheet in the workbook would be sheet = 1).

• You can pass other arguments to the read.xlsx function from the xlsx package.

Here’s a simple example:

RRurl <- 'http://www.carmenreinhart.com/user_uploads/data/22_data.xls'

RRData <- source_XlsxData(url = RRurl, sheet = 2, startRow = 5)

startRow = 5 basically drops the first 4 rows of the sheet.

## 9 May 2014

### d3Network Plays Nice with Shiny Web Apps

After some delay (and because of helpful prompting by Giles Heywood and code contributions by John Harrison) d3Network now plays nicely with Shiny web apps. This means you can fully integrate R/D3.js network graphs into your web apps.

Here is what one simple example looks like:

An explanation of the code is here and you can download the app and play with it using:

shiny::runGitHub('d3ShinyExample', 'christophergandrud')


### European Parliament Candidates Have a Unique Opportunity to Advocate for Banking Union Transparency and Accountability

This is reposted from the original on the Hertie School of Governance European Elections blog.

The discussion of issues around the European Parliament Elections has been beating around the bush for quite some time now. Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt famously described European Elections as ”second-order elections”, in that they are secondary to national elections. A few weeks ago on this blog Andrea Römmele and Yann Lorenz argued that the current election cycle has been characterised by personality politics between candidates vying for the Commission presidency, rather than substantive issues.

However, the election campaigns could be an important opportunity for the public to express their views on and even learn more about one of the defining changes to the European Union since the introduction of the Euro: the European Banking Union.

Much of the framework for the Banking Union has been established in the past year after intense debate between the EU institutions. A key component of the Union is that in November 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) will become the primary regulator for about 130 of the Euro area’s largest banks and will have the power to become the main supervisor of any other bank, should it deem this necessary to ensure ”high standards”.

A perennial complaint made against the EU is that it lacks transparency and accountability. While there are many causes of this (not least of which is poor media coverage of EU policy-making), the ECB’s activities in the Banking Union certainly are less than transparent according to the rules currently set out. As Prof. Mark Hallerberg and I document in a recent Bruegel Policy Note, financial regulatory transparency in Europe and especially the Banking Union is very lacking. Unlike in another large banking union –the United States, where detailed supervisory data is released every quarter – the ECB does not plan to regularly release any data on the individual banks it supervises.

This makes it difficult for citizens, especially informed watchdog groups, to independently evaluate the ECB’s supervisory effectiveness before it is too late, i.e. before there is another crisis.

The European Parliament has been somewhat successful in improving the transparency and accountably (paywall) of the ECB’s future supervisory activities. Unlike originally proposed, the Parliament now has the power to scrutinise the ECB’s supervisory activities. It will nonetheless be constrained by strict confidentiality rules in its ability to freely access information and publish the information it does find.

In our paper, we also show how a lack of supervisory transparency is not exclusive to EU supervisors – the member state regulators, who will still directly oversee most banks, are in general similarly opaque. We found that only 11 (five in the Eurozone) out of 28 member states regularly release any supervisory data. Member state reporting of basic aggregate supervisory data to the European Banking Authority is also very inconsistent.

European Parliamentarians could use the increased attention that they receive during the election period to improve public awareness of the important role they have played in improving the transparency and accountability of new EU institutions. Perhaps, after the election, they could even use popular support that they may build for these activities during the election period to get stronger oversight capabilities and improve financial supervisory transparency in the European Banking Union.

## 30 March 2014

### Numbering Subway Exits

In a bit of an aside from what I usually work on, I've put together a small website with a simple purpose: advocating for subway station exits to be numbered. These are really handy for finding your way around and are common in East Asia. But I've never seen them in Western countries.

If you're interested check out the site: