A test of Marginal Revolution political bias
Here is an email from Daniel Stone at Bowdoin, I am not imposing a double-formatting on it for ease of reading and formatting:
“Dear Tyler (if I may),
I’m a big fan of your work in general, and MR in particular, and think that you do as good a job as anyone at exploring a variety of political perspectives, and sharing related (diverse) research.
Still, you’re human after all J. I’ve always been curious if there are systematic patterns in your writing or links you post.
It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that you sometimes describe research as speculative or imply this by adding a question mark to the end of the link (the example that made me notice this was: “Minimum wage effects and monopsony?”https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/thursday-assorted-links-215.html). At other times your link simply states the main research finding or directly quotes from the paper or its title.
So, while it might be hard to identify a general bias in your links – even if the majority were, say, “pro-liberal”, this wouldn’t necessarily mean *you* were biased, since the majority of good research out there could be pro-liberal, using the added “?”s provides an identification strategy: if you were more likely to add a ? for research that leans one political direction or the other, that would suggest a bias on your part.
As a fun side project, that I thought might also have some value given the importance of MR and understanding bias more generally, I had my RA (Maggie Hanson, cc’d) grab all your links from Assorted Links posts to social science research this year (as of a few days ago). Together we coded the ‘slant’ of each as L, R or N (neutral) – depending on whether the research supports regulation, indicates market failure, etc (admittedly our process here was not extremely scientific). She also recorded whether your link text is phrased as a question (or notes that the finding is speculative, which you did a couple times and seems similar). In addition, for link text phrased as a question, we also noted whether this text is a direct reference to the research paper’s title, as this means you didn’t actually add the “?”.
We did a bit of very basic analysis, here are results:
The distribution of slant across links is quite balanced, but leans left:
. tab sla
Slant |
(L/N/R) | Freq. Percent Cum.
————+———————————–
L | 35 29.17 29.17
N | 58 48.33 77.50
R | 27 22.50 100.00
————+———————————–
Total | 120 100.00
But you were slightly more likely to phrase your link as a question for “L” links vs for Rs (9/35 for Ls vs 5/27 for Rs):
. tab slant endswith
Slant | Ends with ?
(L/N/R) | n y | Total
———–+———————-+———-
L | 26 9 | 35
N | 48 10 | 58
R | 22 5 | 27
———–+———————-+———-
Total | 96 24 | 120
And you were a bit more likely to do this for links that were not direct quotes of article titles that were questions (7/33 = 0.21 for Ls vs 2/24=0.083 for Rs):
tab slant endswith if linktex==”n”
Slant | Ends with ?
(L/N/R) | n y | Total
———–+———————-+———-
L | 26 7 | 33
N | 48 8 | 56
R | 22 2 | 24
———–+———————-+———-
Total | 96 17 | 113
But the magnitude of this difference is not large (and I bet not statistically significant), and the large majority of both L and R links were presented by you without questions marks.
Bottom line: you do present a quite balanced set of research findings, the general distribution leans left but it is hard to interpret this (without knowing the slants of research in general or the slant of research you post elsewhere, aside from Assorted Links). And there is suggestive evidence of a small tendency for you to be more questioning of research supportive of liberal/leftist policies.
Here’s a link to the data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CrPqezV51SCwAwuwjdRqBy4jUlX76Iti0X4P1nKPMpM/edit?usp=sharing
This includes a sheet with all the links that end in ?, that aren’t quotes of article titles, and their slants.
I wanted to share this with you before sharing with others. Please feel free to let me know any questions or comments!
Thanks, and thanks again for all your work. All the best – Dan”