The number of people conducting scientific analyses and the number of topics being studied are higher than ever. At the same time, there are questions about the public value of social scientific endeavors, particularly of federally funded quantitative research (Prewitt 2013). In this article, we contend that data access and research transparency are essential to the public value of the enterprise as a whole and to the credibility of the growing number of individuals who conduct such research (also see Esterling 2013).

In April 2013, a controversy arose when a working paper (Herndon, Ash, and Pollin 2013) claimed to show serious errors in a highly cited and influential economics paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2010). The Reinhart and Rogoff paper had come to serve as authoritative evidence in elite conversations (Krugman 2013) that high levels of debt, especially above the “90 percent [debt/GDP] threshold” (Reinhart and Rogoff 2010, 577), posed a risk to economic growth. Much of the coverage of this controversy focused on an error that was a “perfect made-for-TV mistake” (Stevenson and Wolfers 2013) involving a simple error in the formula used in their Excel calculations. The real story here, however, is that it took three years for this error and other issues to be discovered because replication files were not publicly available, nor were they provided to scholars when asked. If professional norms or the American Economic Review had required that authors publish replication files, this debate would be advanced by three years and discussions about austerity policies would have been based on a more clear-sighted appraisal of the evidence.

Many contentious elections end in disputes about alleged fraud, irregularities, and malpractices. How do we know when these claims are valid and when they are false complaints from sore losers? This article describes a new dataset developed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Based on a survey of election experts, the research provides new evidence to compare how national contests around the world are meeting international standards of electoral integrity. The questionnaire includes 49 key indicators clustered into 11 stages of the electoral cycle, as well as generating an overall summary Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) 100-point index. The evidence displays high levels of external validity, internal validity, and legitimacy. The PEI datasets allow researchers to gauge the perceived quality of elections worldwide. This study summarizes the PEI’s research design, compares the quality of elections around the globe, and illustrates how electoral integrity is linked with both democracy and development.

The voting of Jews in the 2012 US presidential election is discussed in this article within the context of a recent reexamination of historical data on Jewish voting. Two Election-Night polls of Jews and the largest scientific survey of Jews to date make this detailed exploration of Jewish voting possible. Voting differences among Jews are analyzed, especially among major denominational movements. The role of American policy on the Middle East merits specific attention, particularly given concern about the potential Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. Explanations of Jewish liberalness and Democratic identification are considered, with a special focus on the role of social identity. A reluctance of Jewish conservatives to identify as Republicans is discussed as well as how Jewish conservatives react to economic and social issues. The possibility of a party realignment of Jews along generational and denominational lines is considered, as well as the impact of the Republican alliance with Evangelical Christians and the Tea Party.

Although still more common in medical studies and some other areas of social science such as psychology and behavioral economics, experimental work has become an increasingly important methodology in political science. Experimental work differs from other kinds of research because it systematically administers a specific treatment to part of a population while withholding that manipulation from the rest of a subject pool. The best studies strive to keep all other aspects of the experiment similar, so that any emergent difference between the treatment and control group that emerge provide unparalleled traction in determining causal inference. Many other valuable forms of social research use observation of the natural world, rather than depending on intervention to advance understanding. Because experimentalists can create the environment or process they want to study, this strategy of intervention and manipulation constitutes the main distinction between experimental work and other forms of social observation.

This article examines Tea Party candidates for the US House of Representative in 2012. Tea Party and Tea Party–endorsed candidates are similar to other Republican candidates. Although they have served in the House for a shorter period, they have approximately the same financial resources, prior political experience, and reelection rate as other Republicans. Multivariate analysis finds that Tea Party membership and endorsement have no impact on electoral outcome when other political factors are controlled for (e.g., incumbency, running for an open seat, quality of opposing candidate, prior political experience, financial resources, and Obama’s vote). Consequently, the success of Tea Party candidates depends on acquiring the traditional political resources, having weak opponents, and running in favorably disposed constituencies rather than identification with this highly visible political movement.

Kony 2012, a film released by the nonprofit Invisible Children in the spring of 2012, drew a flurry of Facebook “shares” and “likes.” However, critics expressed a concern that the film offered a distorted portrayal of Africans and African politics. In this article, we test these criticisms by asking what effects the film had on college students’ perceptions of Africa and Africans. To address this question, we draw on a survey and an experiment conducted at a small liberal arts college where Kony 2012 enjoyed popularity. The results show that the film did affect students’ perceptions of Africa; specifically, it led many to perceive Africans as lacking agency and autonomy. We argue that whereas the film did have initial negative effects on students’ perceptions of Africa, these effects seem to fade over time. Future research should explore the compounding effects of exposure to images that misrepresent the African continent.

Calls for greater data access and research transparency have emerged on many fronts within professional social science. For example, the American Political Science Association (APSA) recently adopted new guidelines for data access and research transparency. APSA has also appointed the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) ad hoc committee to continue exploring these issues. DA-RT sponsored this symposium. In addition, funding agencies like the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have expanded requirements for data management and data distribution. These pressures present challenges to researchers, but they also present opportunities.

Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology—associated with the Tea Party movement—and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.

This article examines the contributions of nongovernmental international human rights organizations (NGIHRO) in promoting a broad sense of human rights in hybrid regimes using the cases of Amnesty International Hong Kong (AIHK), Green Peace Hong Kong (GPHK), and Oxfam Hong Kong (OHK). It contends that NGIHROs have made significant contributions to public education and fund-raising in Hong Kong. However, with regard to the human rights conditions, it is erroneous to consider Hong Kong as part of the developed world. Together with other probable political considerations, doing so may have led to gaps in the organizations’ roles and functions as advocates for human rights in Hong Kong. In the final analysis, this article uses the political protests in Hong Kong to illustrate the importance of addressing the implications of demands for preserving the local identity and alternative lifestyles in the broader understanding of human rights.

This article provides evidence for bias in the polling of American political candidates who are accused of personal or financial scandal, wherein the support of the accused candidate is understated. Evidence for this phenomenon is found in the analysis of a dataset of district-level polls of US House elections during the 2002–2012 election cycles. This bias helps to explain several unanticipated outcomes in recent American legislative elections, in which scandal-tarred incumbents unexpectedly were reelected or defeated by surprisingly narrow margins. The article also finds evidence of a smaller bias, previously observed by practitioners, wherein support is overstated for incumbents who are not accused of scandal.

Recently, the importance of research transparency via replication studies has been greatly discussed in most of the social sciences, political science included. Indeed, as Gherghina and Katsanidou (2013) and Freese (2007) note, to some extent, the discussion has been prompted by the tremendous changes in publishing in the past decade or so. With the enormous expansion in data availability and instant publication made possible by the Internet, there now are many opportunities to verify the findings presented in the discipline's major journals. “Replication, replication” has not only become the mantra for political science, but for economics, psychology, and quantitative sociology as well. These developments opened a debate on how to best “guard the high standards or research practice and allow for the maximum use of current knowledge for the further development of science” (Gherghina and Katsanidou 2013, 1; for similar sentiments see King 1995).