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,

Cowden for letting tron help macht and lapo with the computing, and Gary Jacobson for giving us his candidate quality data for the 1978–98 midterm elections. All errors are solely the responsibility of the authors.