A POPULAR postelection game, played alike by scholars, communication experts, politicians and other members of conscious political publics, is to speculate vigorously and sometimes convincingly about the reasons why the citizenry supported the winner. What was most important in the thoughts of the voters? What sort of mandate, if any, did the winning party receive? Was there considerable positive identification with the winning party, or negative reaction to the other? Who was responsible for the margin of victory the candidate or the party? An illustration of this type of political analysis occurred during the early hours subsequent to Mr. Eisenhower's triumph of 1952, when, in Springfield, Illinois, members of Adlai Stevenson's inner circle not refrain from talking it over, from looking back and trying to figure what went wrong. 1 In their collective autopsy, Eisenhower's popularity as a national hero, the desire for a change, the Democratic record, President Truman's participation in the campaign, the Korean War, corruption, communism, and inflation were enumerated as decisive elements in the motivational pattern of Republican voters. Moreover, they suggested that there was nothing Mr. Stevenson could have done to diminish Mr. Eisenhower's charismatic appeal, both as a hero of war and prophet of peace. Such a list has sufficient items to avoid serious errors of omission and sufficient cogency to seem instructive, but as a broad sketch of what hap. pened in a presidential election, it merely provides a highly generalized basis for further questions. In terms of a theory of political behavior, one pertinent question, and the one to which this paper is addressed, is the extent to which various occupational strata are impelled to vote for a