Abstract
The rise of behavioral public administration provides new perspectives – especially from a psychological point of view – to understand public administration theories and the growing interest in using experiments to enhance the internal validity of empirical studies. However, psychology and other social sciences are undergoing a replication crisis where experimental results often do not replicate. One reason for the limited replicability is the publication bias sparked by journals’ preference for significant effects and the resulting incentive to create significant results. This study employs a meta-analytical approach to examine the evidential value of experimental evidence in public administration. It uses the p-curve method to test whether this body of research is dominated by selectively reporting significant results. The analysis includes 172 statistically significant findings published in top public administration journals and shows that the distribution of p values of these findings is right-skewed. Such a distribution indicates that the experimental public administration research contains evidential value, which means it is not solely the result of selective reporting of significant results. Although the analysis shows a good sign, we discuss important practices to further strengthen the validity and reliability of experimental methods in public administration.
Highlights
The rise of behavioral public administration provides new perspectives – especially from a psychological point of view – to understand public administration theories and the growing interest in using experiments to enhance the internal validity of empirical studies
Since the p-curve method only uses the subset of significant results, because only this subset can be assumed to be published without a biasing selection effect, we excluded 60 articles with insignificant effects
Analyzing 172 significant effects published in 130 articles, we find that the experimental public administration literature contains evidential value, which means that it is not solely based on selective reporting
Summary
The rise of behavioral public administration provides new perspectives – especially from a psychological point of view – to understand public administration theories and the growing interest in using experiments to enhance the internal validity of empirical studies. This article uses the p-curve method to test the evidential value of the experimental public administration literature. A body of research contains evidential value “if it is not solely the result of p-hacking and selective reporting of significant effects”
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