<\/p>\n
Winners: <\/span>Thad Dunning<\/span><\/a>, UC Berkeley; <\/span>Guy Grossmann<\/span><\/a>, University of Pennsylvania;\u00a0 <\/span>Macartan Humphreys<\/span><\/a>, Columbia University and WZB Berlin Social Science Center; <\/span>Susan D. Hyde<\/span><\/a>, UC Berkeley; <\/span>Craig McIntosh<\/span><\/a>, UC San Diego; <\/span>Gareth Nellis<\/span><\/a>, UC San Diego<\/span>\r\n\r\nTitle of the winning book: \u201cInformation, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I\u201d<\/span>\r\n\r\nPublishing information: <\/span>Cambridge U Press, 2019<\/span>\r\n\r\nCommittee Members: <\/span>Jaime Settle<\/span><\/a> (Chair), College of William & Mary; <\/span>Kevin Esterling<\/span><\/a>, UC Riverside;<\/span> Laura Paler<\/span><\/a>, University of Pittsburgh.<\/span><\/pre>\nGiving the section best book award to the Dunning, Grossman, Humphreys, Hyde, McIntosh, and Nellis\u00a0book is an easy decision.\u00a0 The book is a landmark contribution in the methodology of experimental research and provides a new template for cumulative learning across RCTs.\u00a0 Although classified as an edited volume, the book is very different from the normal kind of edited volume that staples together related papers.\u00a0 Instead, the book is a comprehensive reporting of the results of the EGAP Metaketa I initiative.\u00a0 The initiative involved 31 investigators spanning 20 universities, and included 10 projects that shared common design features developed through the collaboration.\u00a0 Substantively, Metaketa I evaluated the impact of information provision on voting behavior in developing democracies, a topic of very wide interest across subfields of political science.\u00a0 More relevant to the experiments section are the methodological contributions for deploying and analyzing separate RCTs in a way that promotes cumulative learning.\u00a0 There were two main motivations for the authors to undertake this massive project.\u00a0 First, although political science has become adept at using RCTs to ensure the internal validity of studies, internal validity in itself does not advance the accumulation of knowledge in a field since an internally-valid finding in one setting (i.e., one place and time) does not enable others to know how the treatment effect would generalize to other contexts.\u00a0 Second, political science researchers are generally incentivized to conduct disparate and novel studies that prevent the comparability of studies across contexts, and so even in the rare circumstances that there are multiple RCTs on a topic across different contexts, there is no way to aggregate or compare the studies in order to facilitate generalization. The Metaketa I study overcomes these limitations by employing a comprehensive approach to research design.\u00a0 In the design, each individual study met the now widely-accepted best practices to ensure the credibility of findings by combining RCTs to ensure internal validity with research transparency best-practices such as a comprehensive preanalysis plan, open data and code, and third party replication, along with a strict requirement that all campus IRB committees approve all elements of the project.\u00a0 These best practices however are not new to political science.\u00a0 What is novel, and makes the book worthy of our award, is its innovations in the development and implementation of a comprehensive design that ensures comparability across studies.\u00a0 In particular, the authors collaborate to develop a \u201ccommon arm\u201d intervention of information provision that is implemented as identically as possible across all of the 10 different contexts, along with comparable outcome survey measures.\u00a0 The author team is extremely thoughtful in developing standards for evaluating what counts as \u201ccomparable\u201d in interventions and outcome measures that are implemented in diverse contexts and cultures, spanning Africa, Asia and Latin America \u2013 that is, they take care to attend to the subtle issues of ensuring construct validity in the interventions and outcomes across the different contexts.\u00a0 With this basis of comparability across the individual studies, the project demonstrates how to investigate external validity to establish what interventions generalize or do not generalize to different contexts.\u00a0 Finally, the authors aggregate the results of the individual studies using a planned meta-analysis to harness the power of the individual studies to answer the research questions regarding the role of information provision in democratic practice.\u00a0 Although the main results show null findings, the null here is meaningful in that it helps to inform funders and agencies about what kinds of practices might not be worth supporting.\u00a0 Overall, the book is a monumental contribution to advance the agenda of the \u201ccredibility revolution\u201d beyond one-off, discrete studies and shows the way forward for social science to begin to harness the power of RCTs to accumulate generalizable knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\nAll investigators:<\/strong>
\nClaire Adida<\/span><\/a>
\nEric Arias<\/span><\/a>
\nClara Bicalho<\/span><\/a>
\nTaylor Boas<\/span><\/a>
\nMark Buntaine<\/span><\/a>
\nSarah Bush<\/span><\/a>
\nSimon Chauchard<\/span><\/a>
\nAnirvan Chowdhury<\/span><\/a>
\nThad Dunning<\/span><\/a>
\nJessica Gottlieb<\/span><\/a>
\nGuy Grossman<\/a><\/span>
\nDaniel Hidalgo<\/a>
\nMarcus Holmlund<\/span><\/a>
\nMacartan Humphreys<\/span><\/a>
\nSusan D. Hyde<\/span><\/a>
\nRyan Jablonski<\/span><\/a>
\nEric Kramon<\/span><\/a>
\nHoracio Larreguy<\/span><\/a>
\nMalte Lierl<\/span><\/a>
\nJohn Marshall<\/span><\/a>
\nGwyneth McClendon<\/span><\/a>
\nCraig McIntosh<\/span><\/a>
\nMarcus Andr\u00e9 Melo\u00a0<\/span>
\nGareth Nellis<\/span><\/a>
\nDaniel Nielson<\/span><\/a>
\nPaula M. Pickering<\/span><\/a>
\nMelina R. Platas<\/span><\/a>
\nPablo Querub\u00edn<\/span><\/a>
\nPia Raffler<\/span><\/a>
\nCatlan Reardon<\/span><\/a>
\nNeelanjan Sircar<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Winners: Thad Dunning, UC Berkeley; Guy Grossmann, University of Pennsylvania;\u00a0 Macartan Humphreys, Columbia University and WZB Berlin Social Science Center; Susan D. Hyde, UC Berkeley; Craig McIntosh, UC San Diego; Gareth Nellis, UC San Diego Title of the winning book: \u201cInformation, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I\u201d Publishing information: Cambridge U Press, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18144,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-229","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}