Section 2 Description

What are things we want to describe in political science?

• Unemployment rate, GDP
• Voter turnout, vote share for a party in an election
• Percentage of women in the labor force
• Poverty rates over time

What else? What does description help us achieve?

• Identify tendencies
• Identify patterns or trends
• Identify relationships between two or more factors
• Help us generalize from anecdotes, what is common vs. what is uncommon?
• Diagnose demand, needs, potential problems, likely outcomes

Generate ideas for other goals, such as explanation and prediction