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³² The authors who came closest to finding a parallel path to the present one through these problems of reconceptualization and measurement are John R. Van Wingen and David C. Valentine. See especially their ‘Biases in the Partisan Identification Index as a Measure of Partisanship’, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi, 1980Google Scholar, which uses the 1976 NES data.

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³⁴ See Figure 4. The natural scoring on these items was reversed in computing the Index of Political Involvement.

³⁵ For more discussion of how to measure party system support, see Dennis, Jack, ‘Support for the Party System by the Mass Public’, ‘Trends in Public Support for the American Party System’, ‘Changing Public Support for the American Party System’, in Crotty, William J., ed., Paths to Political Reform (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980) pp. 35–66Google Scholar; and ‘Public Support for the Party System, 1964–1984’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 08 1986.Google Scholar

³⁶ For a useful introduction to this technique, see Klecka, William R., Discriminant Analysis (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁸ That Independent Partisan Supporters are relatively positive towards the party system is shown in some of the data from the Pilot Study that preceded the P1 survey. (The Pilot Study was conducted in 1979.) Pilot Study respondents were asked to agree or disagree, along a seven-point scale, with the following: ‘Democracy works best where competition between parties is strong’. Among Independent Partisan Supporters 59 per cent agreed very strongly (point 7 on the 7-point scale). This is in contrast to Ordinary Partisans (23 per cent). Among the Unattached and Ordinary Independents the proportions were 26 and 27 per cent respectively.