Replicating Text: The Cumulation of Knowledge in Social Science

Obtaining a statistically significant result does not necessarily tell us whether we would obtain significant results in other, similar studies, particularly if the original sample sizes were small. This is why we are supposed to replicate experiments. The present study concerns social science events that cannot be repeated by virtue of their being historically situated. Among social science events, many textual data are datable and, by definition, unrepeatable. One solution to this quandary lies in bootstrap replications, which are based on the original data. A case in point is that of founding political speeches such as those that buoy the European construction. We analyze and compare 82 speeches made by President Delors over the period 1988–1994, and 28 by President Santer over the period 1995–1997. We have all these speeches (N = 110) concorded as to which words are used, how often, where, and when, with the help of a computer-aided content analysis package. We then test various hypotheses using replication bootstrap estimates, that is, by replicating the original sample a large number of times and recreating several thousand samples from the population so created.