Harvard President Claudine Gay wrote a paper in 2001 with a thesis that “Black representatives make White people vote less.” There was a focus on Bill Clay of Missouri who served in the House of Representatives from 1969 to 2001. People have questions about her data, but she is not sharing it.Christopher Brunet writes at Substack:
These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.Yesterday on X, new questions arose about Claudine Gay’s data, from Jonatan Pallesen:
If we look at Claudine Gay’s 2001 paper, there are some numbers that raises questions. This has been discussed on Econjobrumors. The thesis is that Black representatives make White people vote less. Looking at the the White Turnout in Clay’s district it seems to be about middle of the pack:
But if we look at the regression results in Table 3, Bill Clay is listed as having a highly significant effect of a 16.8% reduction in voter turnout: I took a look at her PhD thesis which looked at the same data. And here the coefficient is as expected for a data point in the middle of the pack: I checked that her thesis and the paper have the same number of data points, 2827, so it is looking at the same thing. So why did the result change so much between the thesis and the paper? A possibility is that is it caused by a change in control variables. But if the control variables are this crucial, then it is important whether they really should be included, or whether we risk a garden of forking paths. An impactful variable is the winning vote margin. But it has totally different impact in the different states. It seems kind of weird if people in Missouri strongly prefer to vote if the election is close, while the people in Tennessee strongly prefer to vote if the election is not close. I couldn’t find any discussion about why this control variable was introduced, when it wasn’t included originally. In any case Claudine Gay should release her data. Especially since there is such discrepancy between her two publicized results.Making the data public should be standard scientific practice to begin with. Certainly worth looking into, thanks Jonatan — go follow him on X!
So, where is her data?
Well, it turns out that I am not the first one who has searched for it.
She was granted tenure at Stanford in 2005 with just 4 peer-reviewed political science articles to her name: 1998 PolPsych, 2001 APSR, 2002 AJPS, 2004 APSR.
Her 2001 APSR paper, which was central to her already-meager tenure case, was debunked by Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a paper presented at the 2002 conference of The Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) after she would not share her data or code with them.
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