Social scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise,

e propose a comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty, district-level elections. This model, which provides a tool for comparative politics research analogous to that which regression analysis provides in the American two-party context, can be used to explain or predict how geographic distributions of electoral results depend upon economic conditions, neighborhood ethnic compositions, campaign spending, and other features of the election campaign or aggregate areas. We also provide new graphical representations for data exploration, model evaluation, and substantive interpretation. We illustrate the use of this model by attempting to resolve a controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in Britain. Contraiy to previous analyses, all based on measures now known to be biased, we demonstrate that the advantage is small but meaningfkl, varies substantially across the parties, and is not growing. Finally, we show how to estimate the party from which each party's advantage is predominantly drawn. w e propose the first internally consistent statistical model for analyzing multiparty, districtlevel aggregate election data. Our model can

democratization in competitive authoritarian regimes and the formation and success of opposition parties. His other research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, Política y Gobierno, Foreign Affairs en Español, and edited volumes. He has served as co-principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants for elite and voter survey research in Mexico, won a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship, and held visiting positions at the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University and

Using multilevel modeling of state-level economic data and individual-level exit poll data from the 1994, 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections, we find that income has a stronger effect in predicting the vote for the conservative party in poorer states than in richer states—a pattern that has also been found in recent U.S. elections. In addition (and unlike in the U.S.), richer states on average tend to support the conservative party at higher rates than poorer states. Our findings raise questions regarding the role that income polarization and region play in vote choice. The electoral results since 1994 reveal that collapsing multiple states into large regions entails significant loss of information that otherwise may uncover sharper and quiet revealing differences in voting patterns between rich and poor states as well as rich and poor individuals within states.