Inconsistent Individual Attitudes within Consistent Attitudinal Structures: Comments on an Important Issue Raised by John Bartle's Paper on Causal Modelling of Voting in Britain

In a recent article in this journal, John Bartle, has extended work on British voting behaviour by testing the ‘funnel of causation model’ associated with the work of Miller and Shanks. He reported that left–right positions were important determinants of voters' party choices at the 1992 general election, and that these could only partly be linked to social class. John Bartle, ‘Left–Right Position Matters, But Does Social Class? Causal Models of the 1992 British General Elction’, British Journal of Political Science, 28 (1998), 501–29. The key works by Miller and Shanks, on which he draws, include Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).