We learn from this excursus that the amount of available information covaries significantly with the discriminating power of different stimuli, but not with the recovered country-specific “policy moods,” which are the quantities of interest. Our policy moods summarize respondents’ views on a number of stimuli; although these stimuli are not consistently repeated year after year, the summaries relay information about policy stances, and not only information about the number of stimuli included in any given year.