This paper analyses the reactions of a government faced with an unpredictable and unexpected crisis with possible catastrophic long-term effects: the AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. First, the AIDS epidemic is defined as a case study of government forced to cope with uncertainty, moral ambiguity and the knowledge that there are no solutions, only ways of limiting the damage. Second, it examines the evolution of policy of British ministers, who initially preferred to ignore evidence of AIDS but were forced to act by signals threatening a popular backlash. They did so by creating a programme of action based on the advice and values of the medical profession and public health experts. The conclusion argues that this kind of policy response may be generalisable. When societies are faced with problems that do not appear to be soluble but which may imperil social cohesion they seek to create an elite consensus to treat them as technical matters, so insulating the policy process from possible disruptive populist pressures.

Social indicators research developed in the United States at the end of the 1960s and the principal ideas and approaches were received by West German social scientists soon thereafter. It became common usage to speak of a social indicators movement, an expression which is rather unusual in regard to a scientific approach.

The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term ‘social indicators’ dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.

Auditing and Evaluation are two strategies which governments may use to ascertain if existing policies and programs are being administered as they ought. They provide critical information by which to determine the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of government action and are the basis for holding accountable those responsible for the government policies and programs. The analysis compares the strengths and weaknesses of auditing and evaluation as means of monitoring accountability. Three types of accountability are discussed. Auditing makes its strongest contributing to managerial accountability through a focus on fiscal or regulatory issues.

An analytical perspective for grasping how welfare states relate to the ordinary life-pursuits of their population and how the latter relates to the welfare state is needed. What welfare states do is distinguished into social administration, social education, social reform, and social steering. Steering reaches furthest into people's lives. As such it is problematic both to integrative and aggregative theories of democracy; it can also include the possibility of calling forth more signals from the population than less ambitious democratic policies. A systematic overview of aggregate Swedish household data the major activities of households provides a basis for analysing how the population is affected by and affects the welfare state. The state appears as an important provider of work, housing, childcare, and leisure; the most effective signals from households to the state come forward when public provision and subsidy have created tight markets. From the household perspective, signals to government through individual action of various sorts, direct or mediated, appear crucial even in very organized Sweden.

In retrospect, I think that the fate that befell the social indicators ‘movement's rich array of economic statistics and related measures were simply inadequate indicators of emerging developments and issues under prevailing conditions of rapid social change and severe social strains. The felt need was for more adequate monitoring and reporting of social conditions and processes – implying a need to develop improved measures of these phenomena, together with expanded data collection capabilities. Thus the dual goals of the social indicators movement were apparent from the start: to establish an improved social reporting capability as soon as possible, and to encourage longer-term research and development in the general area of social, measurement and model-building. It may be helpful, therefore, to consider the outcome of these two efforts separately.

The social indicator movement has always faced in two directions—toward academic disciplines that provide quality control and estimate causal relations, and toward the political system that chooses and uses indicator statistics. At worst, the movement has risked appearing to be peripheral to both theoretical social science and policy choice; such perceptions may have contributed to the movement's weakening. The use of noneconomic time series of data to guide the definition of public problems, however, did not and will not die away.

More than 25 years have now passed since the idea of a regular social reporting about the effects of political programmes was first introduced, i.e. a System of Social Accounts (SSA) that was to supplement the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA could not provide answers to vital social questions pertaining to those parts of our living conditions that could not be evaluated in economic terms and consequently were not covered by the System of National Accounts, nor to questions of how welfare and living conditions differed in various population groups.