{
  "original_study": {
    "claim": {
      "hypothesis": "...more recent research in economics and political science has suggested that the size of government is also determined by the dispersion or polarization of political preferences.",
      "hypothesis_location": "Section: Introduction; p. 543",
      "statement": "We find that the relationship between polarization and size of government is substantially stronger in democratic countries, supporting the view that polarization affects public spending rather than the other way around.",
      "statement_location": "Section: Introduction; p. 544",
      "study_type": "Observational"
    },
    "data": {
      "source": "World Values Surveys",
      "wave_or_subset": "2000 and 1995",
      "sample_size": "1,000",
      "unit_of_analysis": "individual",
      "access_details": "not stated",
      "notes": "Primarily the 2000 wave, but use the 1995 wave for some countries and analysis. The access is not stated, but there is a reference to the dataset: http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSData.jsp."
    },
    "method": {
      "description": "Authors use standard regression analysis to test the effect of polarization on government size",
      "steps": "(1) Clean the data (e.g. remove unused countries); (2) construct polarization measure using standard errors and also using the Esteban and Ray method; (3) construct the measure of government size as the general government consumption as a fraction of total consumption; (4) ",
      "models": "regression analysis",
      "outcome_variable": "government size",
      "independent_variables": "polarization",
      "control_variables": "geographic dummy variables; colonial origin; logarithm of GDP per capita in 2000; openness to trade in 2000; proportion of population between 15 and 64 in 2000; proportion of population above 65 in 2000; dummy variable indicating whether the country has a federal political structure; indicator variable for Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development membership before 1993",
      "tools_software": "not stated"
    },
    "results": {
      "summary": "Political polarization has a negative and statistically significant relationship with government consumption in the specifications with controls for the mean response and exogenous set of control variables…When the sample is restricted to strong democracies, the estimated effect of polarization on government consumption is statistically significant and robust to the different sets of control variables.",
      "numerical_results": [
        {
          "outcome_name": "government consumption",
          "value": "18.73",
          "unit": "standard deviation",
          "effect_size": "between 2.0 and 6.1 percentage points",
          "confidence_interval": {
            "lower": "not stated",
            "upper": "not stated",
            "level": "not stated"
          },
          "p_value": "0.01",
          "statistical_significance": "1% level",
          "direction": "Negative",
          "notes": "The confidence intervals are not presented, but the standard error is (4.79)."
        }
      ]
    },
    "metadata": {
      "original_paper_id": "10.1017/S0003055410000262",
      "original_paper_title": "Political Polarization and the Size of Government",
      "original_paper_code": "not stated",
      "original_paper_data": "not stated"
    }
  }
}