Replication chains: Political tolerance taken apart

How would you like it if someone replicated your paper? Will it help you, and give you more citations, or will it cause rage? Some authors defend their original work against replication by writing an ‘answer’ paper, and they might claim that the replication was fundamentally flawed or contained statistical and reporting errors. Here’s another interesting replication chain.

Replication chain on political tolerance

Step 1 – Original article: A Multiple Values Model of Political Tolerance, by Mark Peffley, Pia Knigge and Jon Hurwitz, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, Jun., 2001.

Abstract: While students of political tolerance often view tolerance decisions as a trade-off between opposing values (civil liberties versus other values), there have been few explicit attempts to formulate and test such a multiple-values model. With rare exception, researchers typically examine linkages between tolerance judgments and a single value constellation (civil liberties or general norms of democracy) without examining directly the way people rank competing values. In this essay, we use data from a national telephone survey to test a model of how various value trade-off measures (e.g., value conflict) influence citizens’ initial tolerance decisions, as well as their willingness to stick to that judgment in the face of counter-arguments (i.e., the pliability of the initial baseline judgment). We find that while value conflict is often associated with greater political forbearance of disliked groups (e.g., the Klan, flag burners), greater conflict also makes individuals more susceptible to counter-arguments. We also find that when people are presented with roughly equal counter-arguments, the tolerant are much more willing to abandon their initial judgment than the intolerant.

 

Step 2 – Replication: Concept and Measurement Artifact in Multiple Values and Value Conflict Models, by Arthur Miller, Tor Wynn, Phil Ullrich and Mollie Marti, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, Jun., 2001.

“We are concerned that the line of conceptual and measurement work reflected in MVM, and more broadly in similar, related work as summarized in MVM, borders on truism and measurement artifact. (…) Given that we carefully checked and double-checked these results, we can only conclude that the MVM authors made a simple coding mistake … While these analysis errors are not significant enough to dismiss this article totally, they are troublesome, particularly given the professional standing of the senior authors.”

Step 3 – Answer from original author: A Reply to Miller et al.: Replication Made Simple, by Mark Peffley, Pia Knigge and Jon Hurwitz, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, Jun., 2001.

“(…) Miller and his colleagues leveled strong charges against our multiple values approach to the study of political intolerance. (…). In this rejoinder, we show, first, that any problems Miller et al. experienced in replicating our results are of a trivial nature (…) Second, Miller et al.’s evidence concerning the weakness of our value measures is based on a fundamentally flawed analysis.”

 

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Replication chain on voter calls and turnout

 

Coming up: Replication chain on international trade and democracies