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Three hypotheses about the relationship between political performance (specific support) and attitude about the political system (diffuse support) are investigated. Data are from a two-wave panel study carried out during 1974–1976 in the Federal Republic of Germany. No support is found for an Independence hypothesis, which predicts that because system support is acquired during an early age it will be resistant to change during adulthood. The results indicate that the relationship between performance evaluation and system attitude is complex. Support is found for (1) a Social Learning hypothesis, which predicts that system support will respond to differential satisfaction with the performance of an incumbent administration, and (2) a Structuring hypothesis, which predicts that system attitude will influence one's evaluation of the performance of an incumbent administration. It is therefore not possible to rule out reciprocal causation between performance evaluation and system attitude, suggesting that unidirectional causal models are likely to misspecify the true relationship.

Three measures of the strength of association between a category and members of the category were investigated: (a) a naming measure, in which the participants (93 undergraduates) were asked to list the members of a category and the listing order was assumed to reflect associative strength; (b) a latency measure, which assessed the latency to correctly identify specific items as members or nonmembers of a given category; and (c) a facilitation measure, in which the spontaneous activation of an item upon presentation of a category label as a prime was assessed by considering the extent to which the prime facilitated recognition of an initially degraded (visually obscured) item. The three measures correlated substantially, thus validating the naming and latency measures as reasonable approximations of the likelihood that a given item will receive activation in memory when the category is presented. Many of the constructs of interest to survey researchers can be viewed similarly as associations in memory, and the naming and latency measures can be fruitfully used in surveys; research attesting to the utility of namingand latency data is reviewed.