There is No Pearl in this Zionist Oyster: Just a Misuse of Research Discontinuity Design (RDD)

Abstract This article exposes the pseudo-scientific foundation of Carles Boix’s recent American Political Science Review (APSR) publication on Zionism and Jewish national identity. He misapplies the regression discontinuity design (RDD) by treating a historically endogenous imperial border as exogenous, overlooking 59% of missing data, omitting necessary diagnostics, and overfitting with 21 covariates. He conflates a local treatment effect with the deep structural formation of identity—a category error. Identity is a generative primitive shaped by recursive networks, institutional layering, and selective exposure to opportunity structures, not by border shocks. RDD cannot adjudicate between Gellner and Anderson, nor can it uncover mechanisms of national identity formation from spatial discontinuities. The fact that such a design passed peer review reflects a collapse of methodological literacy, where citation gloss replaces epistemological rigor. In contrast, this article develops a superior theoretical model grounded in endogenous network formation, recursive adaptation, and the layered nature of identity transmission.