Substantive Importance and the Veil of Statistical Significance

Political science is gradually moving away from an exclusive focus on statistical significance and toward an emphasis on the magnitude and importance of effects. While we welcome this change, we argue that the current practice of “magnitude-and-significance,” in which researchers only interpret the magnitude of a statistically significant point estimate, barely improves the much-maligned “sign-and-significance” approach, in which researchers focus only on the statistical significance of an estimate. This exclusive focus on the point estimate hides the uncertainty behind a veil of statistical significance. Instead, we encourage researchers to explicitly account for uncertainty by interpreting the range of values contained in the confidence interval. Especially when making judgments about the importance of estimated effects, we advise researchers to make empirical claims if and only if those claims hold for the entire confidence interval.