In June 2016, the United Kingdom carried out a little study to test the hypothesis that it is the “will of the people” that the country should leave the European Union. The result favoured the Leave hypothesis, albeit with a really small effect size (1.89%). This finding came as a surprise to many but as so often it is the most surprising results that have the most impact.
Accusations of p-hacking soon emerged. Not only was there a clear sampling bias but data thugs suggested that the results might have even been obtained by fraud. Nevertheless, the original publication was never retracted. What’s wrong with inflating the results a bit? Massaging data to fit a theory is not the worst sin! The history of science is rich with errors. Such studies can be of value if they offer new clarity in looking at phenomena.
In fact, the 2016 study did offer a lot of new ways to look at the situation. There was a fair amount of HARKing about what the result of the 2016 study actually meant. Prior to conducting the study, at conferences and in seminars the proponents of the Leave hypotheses kept talking about the UK having a relationship with the EU like Norway and Switzerland. Yet somehow in the eventual publication of the 2016 findings, the authors had changed their tune. Now they professed that their hypothesis was obviously always that the UK should leave the EU without any deal whatsoever.
Sceptics of the Leave hypothesis pointed out various problems with this idea. For one thing, leaving the EU without a deal wasn’t a very plausible hypothesis. There were thousands of little factors to be considered and it seemed unlikely that this was really the will of the people. And of course, the nitpickers also said that “barely more than half” could never be considered the “will of the people”.
Almost immediately, there were calls for a replication to confirm that the “will of the people” really was what believers in the Leave-without-a-deal hypothesis claimed. At first, these voices came only from a ragtag band of second stringers – but as time went on and more and more people realised just how implausible the Leave hypothesis really was, their numbers grew.
Leavers however firmly disagreed. To them, a direct replication was meaningless. That was odd for some of them had openly admitted they wanted to p-hack the hell out of this thing until they got the result they wanted. But now they claimed that there had by now been several conceptual replications of the 2016 results, first in the United States and then later also Brazil, and some might argue even in Italy, Hungary, and Poland. Also in several other European countries similar results were found, albeit not statistically significant. Based on all this evidence, a meta-analysis surely supported the general hypothesis?
But the replicators weren’t dissuaded. The more radical among these methodological terrorists posited that any study in which the experimental design isn’t clearly defined and preregistered prior to data collection is inherently exploratory, and cannot be used to test any hypotheses. They instead called for a preregistered replication, ideally a Registered Report where the methods are peer-reviewed and the manuscript is in principle accepted for publication before data collection even commences. The fact that the 2016 study didn’t do this was just one of its many problems. But people still cite it simply because of its novelty. The replicators also pointed to other research fields, like Switzerland and Ireland, where this approach has long been used very successfully.
As an added twist, it turns out that nobody actually read the background literature. The 2016 study was already a replication attempt of previous findings from 1975. Sure, some people had vaguely heard about this earlier study. Everybody who has ever been to a conference knows that there is always one white-haired emeritus professor in the audience who will shout out “But I already did this four decades ago!”. But nobody really bothered to read this original study until now. It found an enormous result in the opposite direction, 17.23% in favour of remaining in Europe. As some commentators suggested, the population at large may have changed over the past four decades or that there may have been subtle but important differences in the methodology. What if leaving Europe then meant something different to what it means now? But if that were the case, couldn’t leaving Europe in 2016 also have meant something different than in 2019?
But the Leave proponents wouldn’t have any of that. They had already invested too much money and effort and spent all this time giving TED talks about their shiny little theory to give up now. They were in fact desperately afraid of a direct replication because they knew that as with most replications it would probably end in a null result and their beautiful theoretical construct would collapse like a house of cards. Deep inside, most of these people already knew they were chasing a phantom but they couldn’t ever admit it. People like Professor BoJo, Dr Moggy, and Micky “The Class Clown” Gove had built their whole careers on this Leave idea and so they defended the “will of the people” with religious zeal. The last straw they clutched to was to warn that all these failures to replicate would cause irreparable damage to the public’s faith in science.
Only Nigel Farage, unaffiliated garden gnome and self-styled “irreverent citizen scientist”, relented somewhat. Naturally, he claimed he would be doing all that just for science and the pursuit of the truth and that the result of this replication would be even clearer than the 2016 finding. But in truth, he smelled the danger on the wind. He knew that should the Leave hypothesis be finally accepted by consensus, he would be reduced to a complete irrelevance. What was more, he would not get that hefty paycheck.
As of today, the situation remains unresolved. The preregistered replication attempt is still stuck in editorial triage and hasn’t even been sent out for peer review yet. But meanwhile, people in the corridors of power in Westminster and Brussels and Tokyo and wherever else are already basing their decisions on the really weak and poor and quite possibly fraudulent data from the flawed 2016 study. But then, it’s all about the flair, isn’t it?