This paper utilizes the 1956–58–60 SRC panel study to examine the degree to which Americans hold attitudes on issues of public policy. The conclusions reject the thesis that only 20 to 30 per cent of the American public have true attitudes and that the remainder either refuse to take a position or respond randomly. The nonattitude thesis is rejected on the basis of: (1) a conceptualization of attitudes which allows for variation in responses through time without necessarily indicating the absence of attitudes or their random fluctuation; (2) an evaluation of the major statement of the nonattitude thesis; (3) a probability model for measuring attitudes in a panel study based on the assumption of twin samples, i.e., a sample of the population at one point in time, and a sample of the individual's attitude through time; and (4) the application of the probability model, leading to the conclusion that the number of individuals with attitudes has been severely underestimated. The implications of that finding are drawn for the relation of responses to attitudes and for democratic elitism.

Studies of American states and their policies are severely handicapped by the use of a single level of analysis. The operations of American politics and the assumptions of correlation methodology imply that only a multi-level approach can adequately comprehend state politics. All major aspects of politics, but particularly policies, are distorted by the single level approach. The extent of distortion suggests that relations among states and between states and the national government are the prime determinants of state politics and that the study of states ought to be organized around these relations. This approach accounts for the salient characteristics of state politics, indicating that states are not political systems but collections of tangentially related components of a national system. States which appear systematic derive their coherence from interactions with the national pattern, a process with important residual effects on the legitimacy of state governments.