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Forecasting the 2006 Elections for the United States Senate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2006

Carl Klarner  and
Stan Buchanan
Carl Klarner
Affiliation:
Indiana State University
Stan Buchanan
Affiliation:
Indiana State University
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Extract

“To arrive at some understanding of what is going on is hard enough,” says Abraham Kaplan, “without having also to meet the demand that we anticipate what will happen next” (1964, 351). Despite Kaplan's warning, attempts at forecasting American elections by political scientists have grown in recent years. Foreshadowing election results is not just a casual interest for political scientists. It both sparks interest in the work of our discipline, and serves as a pedagogical tool. We admit that many challenges present themselves when we attempt to predict complicated social phenomena; but if we, instead, limit our research to description and explanation, the danger is that repeated analysis of the same datasets will track patterns again and again that do not exist in the reality outside our samples. One guard against this is to take theories about politics and employ them to predict future events. In this spirit, this paper utilizes well-known patterns of congressional elections to predict those of the 2006 Senate.

Type
FEATURES
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2006 , pp. 849 - 855
Copyright
© 2006 The American Political Science Association

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