In the twenty years after 1945 both the United States and Britain created public funding regimes for social science, through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) respectively. The historical and political contexts in which these institutions were founded differed, but the assumptions about social science concurred. This article uses archival sources to explain this comparative pattern. It is argued that the political context in both countries played a key role in the development of the two research agencies. In each country the need politically to stress the neutrality of social research – though for different reasons in each case – produced a bias towards positivist scientific methodology, untempered by ideology. This propensity created the trajectory upon which each country's public funding regime rests.

Freedom of expression is celebrated as one of the glories of the American political system. But does all speech deserve immunity? In particular, should speech designed to vilify or degrade on the basis of race be protected? Opinions on racist speech are complicated because they must accommodate two fundamental democratic principles that operate at cross purposes: freedom of expression, which implies support for racist speech, and racial equality, which implies the opposite. Using data from the 1990 General Social Survey, we examine how Americans resolve this conflict. Our major finding is that the principle of free expression dominates the principle of racial equality. What contemporary legal scholars regard as a hard case entailing a collision of democratic principles, ordinary Americans seem to interpret as a straightforward application of just a single principle. This result mirrors and perhaps reflects a nearly century-long and mostly lop-sided debate favouring free speech among American elites.

This article provides an empirical analysis of voting behaviour in the second ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership contest that resulted in John Major becoming party leader and prime minister. Seven hypotheses of voting behaviour are generated from the extant literature relating voting to socio-economic variables (occupational and educational background), political variables (parliamentary experience, career status, age and electoral marginality) and ideological variables (drawn from survey data on MPs' positions on economic, European and moral issues). These hypotheses are tested using data on voting intentions gathered from published lists of MPs' declarations, interviews with each of the leadership campaign teams, and correspondence with MPs. Bivariate relationships are presented, followed by logistic regression analysis to isolate the unique impact that each variable had on voting. This shows that educational background, parliamentary experience and (especially) attitudes to Europe were the key factors determining voting. The importance of Europe in the contest is particularly instructive: the severe problems for Major's leadership which were caused by the issue can be attributed to, and understood in the context of, the 1990 contest in which he became leader.

Social class has long been assumed to be the predominant social or structural determinant of voting behaviour. This article assesses the effect of class on voting behaviour at the 1992 general election by adopting the causal modelling perspective developed by Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks. It explores two mechanisms (party identification and left–right ideological positions) which may mediate the effect of class on voting behaviour. However, it demonstrates that wherever class is assumed to be located in the causal order, it does not dominate analysis of voting behaviour and left–right positions.

The Enlightenment model of social life is a seductive one. It depicts rational (or anyway reasoning) individuals choosing goals and plans and projects for themselves, with those autonomous individuals then coming together, of their own volition, in pursuit of shared interests and common goals. This founding fiction of the modern social world is well captured in the words of one Renaissance writer, who has God saying to Adam:

THE NATURE OF THE UNDERSTANDING

As many political scientists know, ‘biopolitics’ is the short-hand term used to describe the approach of those in the profession who believe that biological concepts — especially evolutionary theory, which treats behaviour as the product of both nature and nurture — and biological research techniques can help us study and understand political behaviour better.