A Call for Replication Studies

Does the Median Voter or Special Interests Determine State Highway Expenditures? Recent Evidence

“…Our findings highlight the importance of replication in political economy and public finance more generally, as argued by Alm (2010). From a public policy standpoint, they suggest that other special interests might now be more powerful in determining state government road expenditures.…”

“…In a similar vein, Beaulier et al (2011) find that traditional political factors such as congressional oversight or importance to the President no longer played a role in military base closures following the passage of the Base Realignment and Closure Act. These papers and other updates of historical political economy models such as Hall et al (2012) and Sobel and Hall (2016) show both the importance of replication (Alm 2010) and how the importance of political economy factors with respect to outcome of collective decision-making can change over time.…”

Valid and Reliable? Basic and Expanded Recommendations for Psychometric Reporting and Quality Assessment.

“…For example, Flake and colleagues (Flake et al, 2022) investigated 100 studies from the Reproducibility Project Psychology and found very weak, if any, psychometric assessments of measures used in the original studies as well as the replication studies. Replication is a cornerstone for all forms of research (Alm et al, 2010;Lamal, 1990;Plucker & Makel, 2021) and questionable measurement practices are a threat to the validity, reliability, and replicability of studies (Flake et al, 2022;Flake & Fried, 2020). Consequently, the problems with non-comparable and unreplicable research results confuse interpretation and hold back advancements in health and social interventions, likely at great costs to society.…”