All the preceding chapters have focused on teasing out a substantively complex but still easily summarized picture of the structure of policy preferences in the general public and its impact on voting behavior in presidential elections. The analysis began with a search for the continuing internal structure to four great policy domains, the ones that were arguably central to postwar policy conflict. It moved on to combine these four within-domain structures to create a cross-domain model, effectively the comprehensive issue context for postwar American politics in the mass public. This analysis extracted specific measures from select dimensions of each domain in order to operationalize the cross-domain context as a basic voting model. Finally, it applied this comprehensive model to voting behavior in all postwar presidential elections to date.

The resulting picture is nothing if not broad-gauge. Four major domains (with their five diagnostic dimensions) interact to contribute an ongoing structure of policy preferences capable of shaping mass behavior across more than half a century. This is not the study of politics in the small. On the other hand, each small step taken in that analysis has enabled further steps, so that possessing this broad-gauge picture – its conceptual framework, its concrete measures, and its voting applications – makes it possible to address a potentially vast array of further topics. One could carry the analysis to different institutions: to Congress, for example, or to state-level office.