Essentials of political analysis

Students are of two minds about methods. Many students can examine graphic or tabular data and offer a reasonably meaningful description. Provided with a set of procedural guide lines, students display considerable facility at setting up cross-tabulations, comparing per centages or means, sketching bar charts, and writing a paragraph describing the data. At the same time, however, students balk at the idea that inferential statistics can serve as an inter pretive tool. They tend to view statistical evidence as an odd element, an additional compli cation quite separate from their substantive findings. "I'm not really a statistics person" is a familiar refrain. Students can be intrepid interpreters of data yet reluctant practitioners of statistics.

This book cultivates students' nascent analytical abilities and develops their statistical reasoning, Chapters 1 through 5 build descriptive and analytic skills in a (mostly) nonstatisti cal context. With these essentials in place, students are able to appreciate the pivotal role of inferential statistics-introduced and applied, with increasing sophistication, in Chapters 6 through 9. Because the practical application of methodological concepts enhances students' comprehension, The Essentials of Political Analysis contains numerous hypothetical and actual examples. And because students become more adept at describing variables and inter preting relationships between them if they learn elemental graphing techniques, the chapters instruct in the interpretation of graphic displays of political variables. In addition to drawing on phenomena from U.S. politics, examples from comparative politics and international rela tions are also included. The narrative encourages students to stop and think about the exam ples, and the exercises at the end of each chapter permit students to apply their newly AST acquired skills. This volume contains forty-four end-of-chapter exercises.