Chapters 1 through 4 have teased out the structure of public preferences in the four great domains of postwar policy conflict, namely social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values. Each of the resulting structures has proved to possess a story all its own. In other words, the public does not bring some grand and general template that it imposes on all policy realms. At the same time, these distinctive stories have testified, each in its own way, to the existence of an ongoing and consistent substructure to public attitudes. It need not diminish the role of political elites in connecting up the various referents for public preferences in these policy realms to note that the public as a whole offers a theoretically coherent and temporally stable pattern of orientations toward them. The same items are related to each other year after year, in a substantively interpretable manner.

As a result, when these structures are put back together, they offer – indeed, they constitute – nothing less than a comprehensive issue context for mass politics in the postwar era. Or at least, it is this context that can be used to search for a practical impact on mass politics, especially here by way of voting behavior. The introduction to Part II will be devoted explicitly to taking the within-domain analyses of Chapters 1 through 4 and converting them into a single comprehensive issue context by way of a cross-domain analysis for all of the postwar years.