Alejandro Ecker

This study investigates researcher variability in computational reproduction, an activity for which it is least expected. Eighty-five independent teams attempted numerical replication of results from an original study of policy preferences and immigration. Reproduction teams were randomly grouped into a ‘transparent group’ receiving original study and code or ‘opaque group’ receiving only a method and results description and no code. The transparent group mostly verified original results (95.7% same sign and p -value cutoff), while the opaque group had less success (89.3%). Second-decimal place exact numerical reproductions were less common (76.9 and 48.1%). Qualitative investigation of the workflows revealed many causes of error, including mistakes and procedural variations. When curating mistakes, we still find that only the transparent group was reliably successful. Our findings imply a need for transparency, but also more. Institutional checks and less subjective difficulty for researchers ‘doing reproduction’ would help, implying a need for better training. We also urge increased awareness of complexity in the research process and in ‘push button’ replications.

Studies on the relationship between religious attitudes and attitudes towards climate change and other environmental issues have tended to focus on the United States. While there is good reason to expect such a relationship to exist, our understanding of it is limited first and foremost by the limited number of country-comparative studies. This study aims to reduce this gap by investigating how trust in the Church and evaluations of Pope Francis affect the views of Latin Americans on anthropogenic climate change. Our study is based on data from the 2017 Latinobarómetro with 13,472 respondents based in 18 Latin American countries. Our findings reveal that Roman Catholics are less likely to believe in manmade climate change as compared to evangelical Christians and respondents belonging to no or any other denomination. We obtain the same negative relationship between trust in the (Catholic) Church and belief in anthropogenic climate change. However, favourable assessments of Pope Francis have a positive effect, and this assessment also has a positive moderating effect on the impact of trust in the Church on the outcome variable. These findings have important implications for climate policies, as they suggest that the public demand for climate action might increase if the Roman Catholic Church in their regional dioceses, rather than mostly the Pope, were to take and communicate a more coherent, affirmative position on climate change.

Which party controls which cabinet posts is an important determinant of how multi-party governments work. Existing research shows that parties’ attention to policy domains in election manifestos is a key predictor of portfolio allocation. However, election manifestos are broad documents and typically published months before an election. This research note argues that policy emphasis in the last few weeks before the election matters for portfolio allocation, because parties can focus their message, react to exogenous events and use campaign communication as a commitment device. A test of this argument makes use of a novel dataset on party representatives’ campaign statements. The findings show that the policy focus of campaign statements, especially those stating positions rather than referring to valence, predicts who will control a ministerial portfolio associated with the respective policy domain.