ABSTRACT
While many political research problems involve relationships between two or more variables, a surprising amount can often be learned from analysis of a single variable. Such familiar statistics as the president’s current approval rating, the unemployment rate, and current median household income are, after all, single variable measures. Simple statistics of this type are often referred to as descriptive statistics because their primary purpose is to help us understand a subject (nation, government, campaign, citizenry) in somewhat greater detail, often by describing the way that some aspect of the subject changes over time. These measures are univariate (one variable) statistics. Analysis that employs univariate statistics is, therefore, univariate analysis.
