Research, Discourses and Democracy. Innovating the Social Science-Policy Nexus

The paper aims to comment on the relations between social scientific research and policy with a view to making certain proposals towards the innovation of the social science policy nexus and to sketch out possible directions pertinent to the MOST Programme’s development. The social sciences owe part of their successful institutionalisation and growth to their promise of providing concrete solutions to social problems. Emulating the methods of the post-Newtonian natural sciences, the social sciences sought to provide objective, value free knowledge about the social realm, to make predictions and to establish discernible causal laws valid across different social contexts. In the second part of the twentieth century this has led to the institutionalisation of an instrumentalist, quantitative and neo-positivist social science that is supposed to aid policy makers take crucial decisions.