To this point, we have subjected an array of policy items from the domains of social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values first to exploratory and then to confirmatory factor analysis. The items themselves were carefully chosen to contain explicit policy implications and to guarantee that any errors associated with their selection would be matters of exclusion rather than inclusion. The product of exploratory and then confirmatory analysis on these items was a set of continuing measures for the four great domains of postwar policy conflict, including recognizable measures for the main dimensions within these domains for at least some span of years.

At an absolute minimum, these results facilitate an understanding of what individual items are measuring and thus what they are contributing to any larger measure. More to the practical point for an analysis concerned with the issue context for mass politics, these results comment powerfully on the internal structure of four great policy domains. And there is indeed something that ought to be called a “structure” to public preferences, one that is stable but not static overall. In the process of teasing it out, these results also provide what is arguably the best available – not the best, just the best available – ongoing means of following issue evolution in these domains over time. The resulting structures and their measures are thus the major within-domain benefit of this approach.