This chapter is about the way in which governments and other large institutional actors in post-democracies use social science for the purpose of justification. If politics is no longer about ideological distinction or even competing material interests – because, as Crouch (2000) tells us, the most major political parties endorse the business interests of dominant forces in market capitalism, so there is no competition – then claims for electoral victory have to be based on something else. One such basis is ‘character’ – a risible and much reduced version of what Max Weber understood when he wrote about charismatic authority. It is now not so much a matter of charisma as of celebrity coupled with ‘moral’ status. However, character matters most where individuals are elected to sovereign power as presidents, however circumscribed or limited that power is. In parliamentary democracies, and especially in the UK which again is a prototype here, a major claim must always be demonstration of effective technical competence in relation to the business of governing. We might treat this as a special and developed case of Weber's notion that legitimate authority can derive from a rational/legal basis. Indeed we could consider it to be the apotheosis of that mode. The argument runs: ‘We deserve power because we have shown you that we can use it well and the way in which we show you that is through the reporting of evidence derived from the practices of social science.’

Evidence does not merely support post hoc claims to demonstrated competence. It also justifies the pursuit of particular policies. Whereas the rational Whig version of the political use of evidence asserts that policy is framed on the basis of truth in the form of evidence – evidence-based policy – we might consider that evidence is often framed in order to sustain policy decisions – policy-based evidence.

This chapter will focus on the politics of evidence. It will examine the political factors in the construction, publication and use of evidence generated by applied social science. It will show how political factors always enter into these processes and review the implications of this for applied social research in general.