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Forthcoming in June

No action or arrangement is even mentioned in the question, so no rule can be inferred. Searing subsumes this question under norms for the "role of the electorate," which in turn is identified with "majority rule" and "responsiveness to public opinion" (p. 241). Perhaps the argument is that the British electorate is indifferent to weakness, ineptitude, and scandal in Government, hence these characteristics should not affect its power. Regardless of the argument, the question ambiguity precludes reliable inferences about support for "rules of the game." When questions are ambiguous, respondents rely on attitudes to one of the objects mentioned in the question text to cue their responses. As Searing points out, party differences on these items correspond both to a difference in "partisan advantage" and to a difference in "political values." Labour members benefit from "greater" opportunities to question Conservative Ministers and might also support corresponding opportunities for Conservatives, if Labour were in power. Hence we would expect party differences on these questions if no "rules of the game" were involved. When ideals and self-interest converge, attitudes correspond. As the questions are ambiguous on the rules and as the assumption that support for the rules is directly tapped is logically or empirically insupportable, the party differences appear to reflect the perceived absence of a constitutional issue. The final difference is the largest one, between Searing, on the one hand, and considerable majorities of both Labour and Conservative MPs, on the other hand. The Members agreed that "it is not dangerous, but essential that the Government reach its policy decisions in private." However, to Searing, support for the British Constitution requires a "disagree." If it were a constitutional rule, the standard of public decision making would have to cover all cases, rendering superfluous some of the other rules, briefings, and questions, for examples. Even a "disagree" response does not indicate support for such a rule, indicating merely that there may be situations in which privacy is not "essential." All we know is that Labour members were somewhat more likely than Conservative members to have such situations in mind in answering the question; we do not know how many of these would support a rule of publicized decision making (although I think that zero would be a fairly accurate prediction). Note that what Searing had in mind—which may be eminently defensible—is irrelevant: interpretation depends on what the members were thinking. None of the questions showing sizable party differences validly measures support for the "rules of the game." These questions, after a "final step" of adding "item values within sets in order to construct the new variables" (p. 242), provide the basis for the article's analysis of party differences. Correlations, principal components, value and subgroup analyses are merely ways of restating and rearranging the percentages, hence are no more valid than the underlying percentages. When the questions are clearly valid, as in the case of "supremacy of Parliament," party differences are negligible. The stress on the weaker findings based on the error-prone measures obscures the more significant and trustworthy confirmation of our prior expectations.