Review Essay: Election Predictions: Theory and Social Science

An important concern for political scientists is the extent to which the discipline has progressed as a science. Political science has based its claim to being a science on its ability to construct models that predict as well as explain political phenomena. We examine the role that philosophers of science have given to prediction in science generally, and then note examples from the history of science that demonstrate a varied role for prediction in differing sciences. A review of the literature on predicting congressional and presidential election outcomes indicates the impressive success of predictive models. Nonetheless, such models are often open to the criticism that they lack a firm theoretical foundation.