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The Politics of Social Research: Institutionalizing Public Funding Regimes in the United States and Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2001

Desmond King
Desmond King*
Affiliation:
St John's College, Oxford
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 415 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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Footnotes

For financial support in undertaking research for this article the author is grateful to the Mellon Fund, Oxford. The author received both helpful written suggestions about the article from several colleagues and valuable comments on earlier drafts of the material presented here from participants in seminars at the University of Essex, Nuffield College, Oxford, and the Atlantic World History Seminar, Oxford. These included: A. B. Atkinson, A. Barker, N. Bowles, I. Crewe, R. Crisp, R. Franzosi, P. Ghosh, R. Hansen, J. Holmwood, N. Johnson, D. McKay, I. McLean, L. McNay, P. Martin, S. Olsaretti, J. Rowett, B. Shafer, M. Solovey, A. Ware, G. Williams and S. Wood. Finally, the author wishes to thank the Journal's Editor, Albert Weale, and anonymous referees for their constructive responses to the article. The usual disclaimer applies.