Share this page!

Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
Twitter logo
5 May, 8 tweets, 2 min read
Is freedom of speech under threat on university campuses?
Excited to announce this project:
➡️Preregistered adversarial collaboration
➡️Skeptics & proponents with diverging perspectives come together to devise a joint research design
Please participate&RT.
doi.org/10.31219/osf.i… Image
This project takes up a study by Revers / Traunmüller based on a survey among students at a German university.
The study claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Twitterverse and printed media discussed the study quite a bit.
Criticism concerned issues of study design and item wording as well as the normative framing of the results.
taz.de/Studie-zu-Canc…
Some of the disagreement regarding the findings seem to reflect differences in the researchers’ epistemic, methodological, and ideological backgrounds.
This project is motivated by the desire to leverage this diversity of perspectives in a constructive way.
Coined by Daniel Kahnemann, adversarial collaborations bring together dissenting scholars in a good-faith effort to conduct debates by carrying out joint research.
The objective of this type of research enterprise is to reach a consensus on research design and inference criteria and to put one’s (potentially competing) hypotheses to an empirical test.
We are looking for scholars to join the group of skeptics who disagree with the original study’s conclusion.
2-3 social scientists with expertise in quantitative survey methodology and/or expertise in freedom of speech and/or experience with Open Science practices.
Please consider participating and please help to spread the word. Thank you!
I am very open to questions here or via zoom.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Alexander Wuttke

Alexander Wuttke Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Kunkakom

Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
23 Nov 20
What can you do when an experiment yields null results?

I developed a theory to explain why (some) people derive pleasure from political engagement
14 out of 15 predictions failed

▶️A step-wise process to maximize the informational value of null results
doi.org/10.1017/pls.20… Image
The need-based theory of political motivation in a nutshell:

Building on the ‘Pleasure Principle’, I suspect that people will seek behaviors that made them feel good in the past.
Citizens will therefore seek political engagement when it previously made them feel good. Image
To understand what actions provide pleasure, I built on the concept of basic psychological needs.
Differences in intrinsic political motivation are theorized to reflect whether political engagement was previously experienced as satisfying basic psychological needs. Image
Read 11 tweets
Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
17 Oct 20
Fantastic work (@The_JOP) focusing on political representation with value for the entire discipline.
Exemplary of good science, I think.

▶️Multiverse analyses to assess robustness of earlier findings to model specifications
▶️Collaboration between replicator & original authors
After Hansen&Treul reported evidence for a substantive finding in a JOP article, Saraceno reproduced the analysis and found inconsistent evidence for different model specifications.
The journal then invited all three authors to team up and work together to check the robustness. Image
The newly minted team decided that multiple analytical choices are reasonable for six variables, leading in combination to 288 possible models with reasonable analytical specifications. Image
Read 12 tweets
Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
18 Jul 20
WOW 😍
Boba appears a huge leap towards transparent sensitivity analyses in empirical research
▶️easy multiverse analyses
▶️generates code for all reasonable analytical paths
▶️software-independent (R, Python...)
▶️amazing #dataviz
arxiv.org/abs/2007.05551 ImageImage
You will write your syntax and specify where two or more analytical choices are reasonable.
Boba will generate the code for all combinations of reasonable choices for you. ImageImage
Boba is a domain-specific language (and a visual analysis system) so it works software-independent for #Rstats, #Python etc...
Read 7 tweets
Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
31 Mar 20
Regression analysis with observational data remains the primary analytical method in political science.

However, we will never know whether we controlled for all unobserved confounders.

New sensitivity tools help to assess how likely results are robust to missing controls.
The robustness value (@analisereal,@chadhazlett) applies to multivar. regressions: It is the minimum strength of association that unobserved confounding would need to have, both with the treatment and with the outcome, to change the research conclusions.
The robustness value can be calculated with a Shiny Application (carloscinelli.shinyapps.io/robustness_val…) or with the #rstats package sensemakr.
Read 8 tweets
Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
24 Mar 20
V-DEM, potentially the most comprehensive measure on the state of democracy, has published a new report, and the results are staggering.
▶️Hungary is no longer considered a democracy
▶️India is close, too
▶️Now, the majority of people worldwide live in autocracies
(thread)
The report (v-dem.net/media/filer_pu…) is worth reading.

It is a prime example of how to communicate complex data on important questions:
Accessible language combined with intuitive graphs that help to convey clear messages.

I'll copy key graphs and phrases while reading along.
Assessing "the state of democracy" is hard because the concept is complex and controversial.
But even if conceptual questions were settled, collecting all necessary measures to assess how democratic a country is is a huge undertaking.
Read 14 tweets
Alexander Wuttke Profile picture
9 Feb 20
People again discuss that certain countries can no longer be considered democracies (Hungary? US?)
Under which conditions do countries qualify as a 'democracy' and what's the alternative category called?
This thread links to a seminal piece on 'electoral authoritarianism'
One line of disagreement is whether to distinguish countries by the *degree* of democratic quality.
While these fine-grained distinctions have value, in his piece Schedler makes the point that "[some] regimes are not less democratic than democracies, but plainly undemocratic."
This raises the question about the essence of what a democracy is.
According to Schedler, having a choice is at the heart of the democratic idea.
Choosing is institutionalized via elections.
However, both plainly democratic and plainly undemocratic countries conduct elections.
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @Kunkakom has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @Kunkakom!

Read all threads by @Kunkakom

:(