The study, published in Science magazine, was conducted by Columbia University political science professor Donald Green and UCLA grad student Michael LaCour. Green initiated the retraction after discovering that LaCour’s work comprised “an incredible mountain of fabrications with the most baroque and ornate ornamentation.”
In an extensive report, Buzzfeed News detailed that three researchers were unable to reproduce LaCour’s findings, instead discovering multiple “statistical irregularities” in the data. Additionally, LaCour’s claims of having received funding for the study from three organizations – the Ford Foundation, the Williams Institute at UCLA, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund – have been denied by the organizations themselves.
