This textbook introduces the scientific study of politics, supplying students with the basic tools to be critical consumers and producers of scholarly research.

Paul M. Kellstedt is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the American Politics Program at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes (2003), which won the Goldsmith Book Prize. Professor Kellstedt is also the author or co-author of articles appearing in scholarly journals such as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis, as well as several book chapters. He has been an Academic Visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Harvard University Fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government.

1. The scientific study of politics; 2. The art of theory building; 3. Evaluating causal relationships; 4. Research design; 5. Measurement; 6. Descriptive statistics and graphs; 7. Statistical inference; 8. Bivariate hypothesis testing; 9. Bivariate regression models; 10. Multiple regression models I: the basics; 11. Multiple regression models II: crucial extensions; 12. Multiple regression models III: applications; Appendix A: critical values of chi-square; Appendix B: critical values of t; Appendix C: the ¿ link function for binomial logit models; Appendix D: the ¿ link function for binomial probit models.