Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory You're a social scientist with a hunch: The U.S. economy is affected by whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. Try to show that a connection exists, using real data going back to 1948. For your results to be publishable in an academic journal, you'll need to prove that they are "statistically significant" by achieving a low enough p-value. 1 CHOOSE A POLITICAL PARTY Republicans Democrats 2 DEFINE TERMS 3 IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP? Which politicians do you want to include? Presidents Governors Senators Representatives How do you want to measure economic performance? Employment Inflation X GDP Stock prices Other options X Factor in power Weight more powerful positions more heavily Exclude recessions Don't include economic recessions Given how you've defined your terms, does the economy do better, worse or about the same when more Republicans are in power? Each dot below represents one month of data. A BETTER ECONOMY to MORE REPUBLICAN POWER 4 IS YOUR RESULT SIGNIFICANT? If there were no connection between the economy and politics, what is the probability that you'd get results at least as strong as yours? That probability is your p-value, and by convention, you need a p-value of 0.05 or less to get published. 1.00 0.50 0.05 Result: Almost Your 0.06 p-value is close to the 0.05 threshold. Try tweaking your variables to see if you can push it over the line! If you're interested in reading real (and more rigorous) studies on the connection between politics and the economy, see the work of Larry Bartels and Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. Data from The @unitedstates Project, National Governors Association, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Yahoo Finance.