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Political scientists generally derive their quantitative methodologies from two disparate traditions: econometric or psychometric. The psychometric tradition has made a lasting impact on political analysis through attention to issues of measurement. Measurement issues are particularly troublesome to political scientists because many interesting concepts are either latent or multidimensional. On the other hand, the econometric tradition has provided political scientists with a means of coping with macrolevel phenomena. In studying macrophenomena, the problem of few cases (there is only one American economy, for example) is handled by using longitudinal analysis. Econometrics provided tools for coping with challenges that longitudinal analysis posed for regression analysis.

This paper focuses on the interpretational difficulties that confound polynomial regression analysis. While polynomial regression is statistically sound, it produces awkward equations which "describe" a curve with a series of linear slopes. An example illustrates the technique and the awkward properties of regression coefficients in the quadratic case. Finally, the paper briefly outlines an algebraic manipulation that transforms polynomial regression equations into a format that is readily interpretable.

This work examines how elections get called mandates, how elected officials respond to these claims, and how public policy changes as a result. Whether or not an election really does carry a message from the electorate, the media and the Washington community sometimes declare an election to be a mandate for a general change in the direction of public policy

Political science has not come to terms with the idea of electoral mandates. The discipline's view is a hodgepodge of competing claims. In this article we review the empirical issues about mandates asking whether or not mandates occur and with what effect. We observe evidence of mandates as social constructions, as dialogues in the Washington community and in the press which serves it.We find that these dialogues accurately reflect election results – consensus emerges from actual sweeping election victories and not from mere strategic attempts to claim policy mandates. We find that Congress is highly responsive to the consensus interpretation. It engages in bursts of unusual policy activity which run for some months and then cease. And we find that these have a substantial policy legacy, that the changes that occur in these bursts produce some of the most important movements in American public policy.

The discussion of presidential mandates is as certain as a presidential election itself. Journalists inevitably discuss whether the president‐elect has a popular mandate. Because they see elections as too complex to allow the public to send a unitary signal, political scientists are more skeptical of mandates. Mandates, however, have received new attention by scholars asking whether perceptions of mandate arise and lead representatives to act as if voters sent a policy directive. Two explanations have emerged to account for why elected officials might react to such perceptions. One focuses on the president's strategic decision to declare a mandate, the second on how members of Congress read signals of changing preferences in the electorate from their own election results. We test these competing views to see which more accurately explains how members of Congress act in support of a perceived mandate. The results indicate that members respond more to messages about changing preferences than to the president's mandate declaration.

Many different elements make up the strength of a president, but a president with a majority in both houses of Congress works from a position of power. While a congressional majority does not guarantee that a president can pass his agenda (witness Jimmy Carter and the first two years of the Clinton presidency), a president that has majority in Congress will have natural allies instead of natural enemies when he works to enact his legislative agenda.

Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998), macropartisanship is largely shaped by presidential approval and consumer sentiment. It is not the case, however, that macropartisanship mirrors the ever-changing levels of current presidential popularity and prosperity. Rather, macropartisanship reflects the cumulation of political and economic news that shapes approval and consumer sentiment. Using ECM technology, we show that, far from being the weak force that Green et al. suggest, the cumulation of innovations in presidential approval and consumer sentiment largely account for the long-term trends in macropartisanship. For forecasting macropartisanship in the near future, it is better to predict from the fundamentals represented by the history of approval and consumer sentiment up to a given moment than from current values of macropartisanship itself.