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Forecasting the 2006 Elections for the U.S. House of Representatives

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,” said Abraham Kaplan, “without having also to meet the demand that we anticipate what will happen next” (1964, 351). Political scientists have been taught to describe and to explain phenomena rather than to predict them. Kaplan, for one, appeared to think that this was enough. But within the rich soil of explanation, Kaplan admitted (346), lay the seed of prediction. Indeed, Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948, 138), whom Kaplan took to task for saying so, flatly stated that “an explanation is not fully adequate” unless it also served as the basis for prediction (quoted in Kaplan, 346).

Type
FEATURES
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2006 , pp. 857 - 861
Copyright
© 2006 The American Political Science Association

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