Last Updated on August 9, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Social policy refers to the actions governments take to influence society: laws, spending decisions, welfare provision, education reforms, crime control strategies. It also covers what opposition parties and social movements say they would do if they held power. When sociologists talk about social policy, they usually mean two connected things at once — the policies themselves, and the question of whether sociological research should be shaping them.
That second question is the one AQA examines. The specification does not ask you to list government policies. It asks whether sociology can and should influence social policy, and different perspectives give very different answers. Positivists think sociologists should work with governments. Marxists think doing so makes you a servant of a system you ought to be attacking. Postmodernists largely think the whole debate is misconceived. Knowing where each perspective stands, and being able to criticise it, is what earns marks here.
Why sociologists study social policy
Sociology grew up alongside the modern state. The early sociologists were not writing for other academics; they were writing for governments trying to manage the upheaval of industrialisation. That connection has never fully gone away, and it creates a genuine tension that runs through the whole topic.
On one side is the argument that sociology is pointless unless it improves things. If you can show that a policy causes harm, or that a social problem has a cause nobody has noticed, then saying nothing is a kind of failure. On the other side is the argument that once you start writing reports for governments, you write what governments will accept — which means the questions that most need asking never get asked.
It is worth being clear about a distinction that students often blur. A social problem is something causing suffering that people want fixed: poverty, knife crime, domestic violence. A sociological problem is anything sociologists want to explain, including things nobody thinks of as a problem at all — why most people obey the law, why families stay together. Governments fund research into social problems. Sociologists are often more interested in sociological problems. That mismatch explains a lot of why so much sociological research never reaches a minister’s desk.
What stops sociology influencing policy
Even where research is clear and well conducted, several things get in the way of it turning into policy. These are useful evaluation points because they apply to every perspective below.
Electoral popularity. Governments have to be re-elected. A policy that the evidence supports but voters dislike is unlikely to survive contact with an election campaign. Evidence on prison sentencing is a standard example — research pointing towards shorter sentences runs straight into public opinion pointing the other way.
The ideological preferences of governments. Governments commission research that fits what they already believe and quietly shelve research that does not. A Conservative government is more receptive to New Right findings on family breakdown; a Labour government is more receptive to social democratic findings on poverty.
Globalisation. National governments have less control than they used to. Policies on corporate taxation, migration or environmental regulation run into the fact that capital and people move across borders, and that international bodies and trade agreements constrain what any one government can do.
Cost. Research often points towards expensive solutions. Reducing child poverty substantially costs money, and governments operating under fiscal constraints reach for cheaper interventions even when the evidence for them is weaker.
Positivism and Functionalism
For Positivists and Functionalists, the sociologist’s job is to supply the state with objective, value-free data that uncovers the root causes of social problems. Policy recommendations then work like cures: identify the cause scientifically, prescribe the treatment.
Comte and Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both saw research as part of the Enlightenment project — using science and reason to improve society. Durkheim, and later Parsons, believed that comparing societies across nations and across history was beginning to reveal the laws of social evolution, which would let sociologists tell governments what policies were appropriate for managing social change. Durkheim’s own suggestions were strikingly ahead of his time: a meritocratic education system, and the abolition of inherited wealth, so that the most talented people rather than the best-connected ones would reach positions of influence.
Durkheim’s study of suicide is the classic demonstration of the method — take a phenomenon everyone assumes is purely personal, show it has social causes, and the door opens to social solutions.
This approach is not just historical. Governments still gather data on precisely this model. The Office for National Statistics employs several thousand people collecting and analysing data on everything from births, marriages and deaths to crime statistics, and the national census does the same job on a larger scale. Governments use it to work out how many school places, hospital beds and prison places will be needed. That is Positivism in action, whether or not anyone involved calls it that.
The government’s Child Poverty Strategy, published in December 2025, is a recent example of the same logic: a taskforce spent well over a year assembling an evidence base before ministers announced policy, and the strategy came with published projections of how many children each measure was expected to lift out of poverty. Whether those projections turn out to be right is a separate question, but the method is exactly what Comte and Durkheim had in mind.
Evaluation. Interpretivists argue that the model misunderstands what social life is — statistics on suicide or crime are social constructions produced by coroners and police officers, not neutral facts waiting to be counted. Marxists and Feminists argue that “value-free” research is nothing of the kind: choosing to research the causes of benefit fraud rather than the causes of tax avoidance is already a political choice. And the approach is inherently conservative in effect, because it accepts the government’s definition of what counts as a problem and confines itself to fixing the system rather than questioning it.
Social Democratic perspectives
Social democrats agree with Positivists that sociologists should work with governments, but they attach a clear political goal to it: reducing inequality through the redistribution of wealth. Research should document the extent of poverty and disadvantage precisely enough that governments cannot ignore it.
Peter Townsend’s work on poverty is the standard example, and a genuinely successful one. Townsend argued that poverty should be understood in relative terms — not just as physical survival, but as being unable to participate in the normal life of the society you live in. His large-scale surveys of deprivation in the UK fed directly into arguments for better welfare provision. This is a case where sociological research measurably changed how poverty was defined and measured in policy.
Townsend’s relative definition is still doing the work today, which is worth pointing out in an exam. The child poverty figures politicians argue about are relative measures — households below 60% of median income — and that measure exists because sociologists argued for it. The clearest recent example of social democratic policy is the removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit, announced in the November 2025 Budget and taking effect from 6 April 2026, alongside the Child Poverty Strategy published in December 2025. The government projected that scrapping the limit would lift around 450,000 children out of relative poverty, at a cost of roughly £3 billion a year by the end of the decade. Redistribution, justified by evidence, is the social democratic position in a sentence.
Evaluation. The New Right argue that welfare provision of the kind social democrats recommend breeds dependency, creating the very problems it was meant to solve. Marxists take the opposite line: social democratic reforms are patches on a fundamentally exploitative system, and by making capitalism slightly more bearable they delay the change that is actually needed — and they can point out that even after the two-child limit was scrapped, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated around four million children would still be in poverty by 2029/30. Postmodernists argue that the large-scale, one-size-fits-all policies social democrats favour ignore the diversity of contemporary society.
Marxist perspectives
Marxists argue that sociological research should be targeted at exposing two things: the exploitation carried out by the bourgeoisie, and the oppression of the working class. Marxist-inspired research includes work on social class and inequality in education, the unfair operation of the criminal justice system, Tombs and Whyte’s research on the harms done by corporate elites, and Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level on the social costs of inequality.
On whether governments listen, Marxists are blunt: they mostly do not, because governments are drawn from the upper middle classes and have no interest in research that indicts them. Social policies, on this view, generally protect the interests of the wealthy, and there are several examples that support the claim.
In education, the continued existence of private schools allows wealthy parents to buy their children a better education. Privately educated pupils are effectively hot-housed, are more likely to achieve top A-level grades, and are disproportionately represented at elite universities. The 1988 Education Reform Act attracts the same criticism: marketisation and parental choice gave middle-class parents, with the money and cultural capital to work the system, a further advantage.
Private schools are a live policy question rather than a historical one, and the current example is a good one to use. From January 2025, private school fees were subject to 20% VAT for the first time, and independent schools in England also lost their business rates relief. Average fees rose sharply — the Independent Schools Council reported a rise of around 22% in the first year — and pupil numbers fell by more than the government had forecast. A Marxist would read this as evidence for their case rather than against it: a policy that taxes private education without abolishing it leaves the fundamental advantage intact, because the families who could afford £20,000 a year can mostly still afford £24,000.
In crime policy, the government does not adequately fund the bodies that prosecute corporate and financial wrongdoing — the Health and Safety Executive, and the regulators responsible for financial crime — despite research suggesting that these crimes together do more economic damage than all street crime combined. Meanwhile street crime, committed disproportionately by the poor, receives the funding and the political attention.
In taxation, top rates of income tax were dramatically higher before 1979 and were cut sharply under Thatcher, a pattern that has broadly continued since. The additional rate now stands at 45% on income above £125,140. Marxists also point to what has happened at the other end: the personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021 and is due to stay there until 2031, which means that as wages rise with inflation, more low earners are pulled into paying tax and more middle earners into the higher rate without any government ever announcing a tax rise. This is known as fiscal drag, and it is a useful example precisely because it is invisible — a policy that raises money from ordinary earners while generating none of the political argument a rate rise would.
Marxists conclude that because this bias is built into the policy-making process, sociologists should not aim to work with governments at all. They should identify with the underdog and carry out critical research — self-funded, necessarily — that alerts people to the injustices of capitalism and contributes to the movement that will eventually bring it down.
Evaluation. The obvious objection is that a great many social democratic policies really have benefited the working class: the NHS, free secondary education, the minimum wage, health and safety legislation. It is hard to argue these were designed purely to serve the wealthy. Critics also point out that the Marxist position is close to unfalsifiable — reforms that help workers are dismissed as ideological control designed to prevent revolution, which means no possible evidence could count against the theory. Finally, refusing to engage with government on principle means the research has no route to changing anything, which is a strange position for a theory that insists the point is to change the world.
Feminist perspectives
Feminists focus research on gender inequalities, though what they want from policy depends on which strand of feminism you are talking about — a distinction worth making explicitly in an exam answer.
Liberal Feminism has traditionally worked with and through government, campaigning for legal and economic equality. This is the strand with the clearest record of policy success. Successive UK governments have been pushed into legislating on gender equality: the vote in 1918 and 1928, the Divorce Reform Act 1969, the Equal Pay Act 1970, the criminalisation of rape within marriage in 1991, the extension of paternity leave in 2011, and the Equality Act 2010.
Two recent changes are worth knowing, because contemporary examples are rare in this topic and stand out in an exam. In June 2025 MPs voted by 379 to 137 to remove women from the criminal law on abortion in England and Wales, ending the possibility of prosecution under an 1861 statute for ending their own pregnancy — a change campaigners had pursued for decades. And from 6 April 2026, under the Employment Rights Act 2025, paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights, removing the qualifying periods that had excluded parents who changed jobs. Both are textbook liberal feminist successes: incremental, legislative, achieved by working with the state rather than against it.
Radical and contemporary Feminism is less interested in working through the state and more concerned with issues that legislation has barely touched patriarchal ideology within the family— domestic violence, the pornification of culture, the beauty myth, sex trafficking, and the persistence of inequality at work and in politics. The argument is that formal legal equality has been achieved while the substance has not.
Feminists also argue that policy can move backwards, and that gains are never permanent. During the austerity programme that followed 2010, feminist analysts calculated that around 70% of the money raised by cuts to benefits and services came from women, since women rely more heavily on both. Even the 2025 abortion vote makes the point: it decriminalised women, but left the doctors and partners who help them exposed to prosecution, and it was opposed by 137 MPs. Rights in this area are contested rather than settled.
Evaluation. Liberal Feminism is criticised by radical feminists for accepting the existing system and settling for legal changes that leave underlying power relations intact. Radical Feminism faces the opposite criticism: enforcing its recommendations would mean the state intervening much more deeply in private life, which many people — including many women — would reject. Both are criticised by Black and postmodern feminists for treating women as a single group with shared interests, when class, ethnicity and sexuality cut across gender in ways that matter for policy.
Interactionist perspectives
Interactionists argue that research should be small-scale and focused on micro-level interaction, aiming for Verstehen — a genuine understanding of how people experience their situation from the inside. Research in this tradition has concentrated on processes such as labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy, and has typically taken the side of the underdog. Venkatesh’s sympathetic account of crack dealers in Chicago is a good example: it treats them as people with reasons rather than as a problem to be solved.
Interactionists such as Becker turn the usual question around. Rather than asking how government can solve social problems, they point out that government is a major source of the labels that create social problems in the first place. People in power label people unlike themselves as deviant, and those labels stick.
Governments have not, on the whole, found this research useful. It is too critical, too sympathetic to people governments would rather punish, and too small-scale to generate the kind of headline findings policy documents are built on. There are exceptions: research on police labelling contributed to the introduction of compulsory training on race and diversity in the police, and similar training for teachers and other public sector workers.
Evaluation. The scale is the problem. A study of thirty people in one city, however rich, cannot tell a government what to do nationally, and interactionists have no clear answer to the question of what policy should follow from their findings. Marxists add that focusing on labelling in classrooms and police stations distracts from the structural inequalities that decide who ends up in front of a police officer at all.
The New Right and Neoliberalism
The New Right believe the state should have minimal involvement in society, and are particularly opposed to using state welfare to deal with social problems. It helps to think of them as functionalism updated for the late twentieth century: they share the functionalist view that society works best when it is stable and people take responsibility for themselves, but they draw the opposite conclusion about the state’s role in achieving it.In their view, state intervention in family life and education robs people of their freedom and undermines their sense of responsibility, which in turn produces worse problems — crime, delinquency, family breakdown.
Charles Murray’s theory of the underclass is the classic statement. Murray argues that overly generous welfare benefits and council housing created perverse incentives, producing a population of over a million people in the UK dependent on state hand-outs, including large numbers of lone mothers abandoned by irresponsible fathers. None of this, he argues, would happen if people knew the state would not step in. The New Right also point to the strong correlation between long-term unemployment and social problems such as binge drinking and crime.
New Right thinking has been genuinely influential on policy, which makes it useful evidence that sociology can shape social policy. Breakdown Britain (2007), a report from a Conservative think tank, proposed cutting unemployment benefit to make it less attractive, tax incentives favouring married over cohabiting couples on the grounds that marriage is more stable, and marriage preparation and parenting classes where needed. New Right thinking also lies behind the marketisation of education in the 1988 Education Reform Act, benefit cuts and caps, and Right Realist crime control — including Broken Windows theory and Zero Tolerance Policing. The one area where the New Right want the state to do more is law and order.
The clearest recent example is the two-child limit on Universal Credit, introduced in 2017. The justification given was pure New Right reasoning: that families on benefits should face the same financial decisions about having children as families supporting themselves through work. By April 2025 it affected around 483,000 families, and it was removed a year later.
This is a genuinely useful example because you can watch the argument happening. The removal of the limit was attacked by the Conservatives on exactly the grounds Murray would have used, and Reform UK — having previously promised to scrap the limit — announced it would reinstate it in full. Meanwhile the evidence cuts against the New Right framing: a majority of the families affected had at least one parent in work, which is difficult to square with a theory about welfare dependency among the workless. If you need to show that this debate is live rather than historical, this is the case to use.
Evaluation. The obvious criticism is that Murray confuses correlation with cause: unemployment and social problems go together, but poverty is at least as plausible a cause of both as welfare dependency is. Critics point out that benefit levels in the UK are not generous enough to make dependency a rational choice, that most people on benefits move off them quickly, and that a large proportion of claimants are in work — around one in five people in poverty in the UK lives in a working household, which undercuts the image of the underclass as people who have chosen not to work. Marxists and Feminists argue that New Right policies perpetuate inequality, since cutting welfare and marketising services hits the poorest hardest — and that blaming lone mothers for social problems is a way of avoiding the question of low pay and insecure work.
Postmodern and Late Modern perspectives
Postmodernists are largely uninterested in social policy, and for a reason that follows from their theory. If there is no objective truth, sociology has no special authority to tell governments what to do — it is one narrative among many. Postmodernists are broadly in favour of diversity and choice, so they would be sympathetic to legislation such as the 2010 Equality Act, but their position is more a general disposition than a policy programme.
Late Modernists take a different route. Giddens and Beck argue that social policy has to adapt constantly to globalisation, because the risks societies face are no longer contained within national borders. Both New Right and New Labour education policies can be read as responses to global economic competition, as can a great deal of crime control policy. Giddens’ influence on New Labour’s “Third Way” is a well-documented case of a sociologist shaping government thinking directly.
Evaluation. The postmodern position is open to the charge that it is a cop-out: if all narratives are equally valid, there is no basis for objecting to any policy at all, including deeply harmful ones. It also seems to disqualify sociology from doing the thing it was invented to do. Late Modernism is criticised for treating policies as neutral, technical responses to globalisation when they are political choices — presenting marketisation as something globalisation required obscures the fact that governments chose it.
Summary grid
| Perspective | Should sociology influence policy? | Policies supported or criticised | Key evaluation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Positivism / Functionalism | Yes — supply value-free data on the causes of social problems | Official statistics, the census, evidence-based planning | Statistics are socially constructed; “value-free” research accepts the government’s agenda |
| Social Democratic | Yes — document inequality to argue for redistribution | Townsend on poverty; the 2025 Child Poverty Strategy; scrapping the two-child limit (2026) | New Right: welfare breeds dependency. Marxists: patches up capitalism |
| Marxist | No — work with the underdog, not the state | Criticises private schools, the 1988 Education Act, selective law enforcement, fiscal drag | Many social democratic policies did benefit workers; the theory is hard to falsify |
| Feminist | Liberal: yes. Radical: less so | Equal pay, divorce, day-one paternity leave (2026), abortion decriminalisation (2025); austerity criticised | Liberal feminism too accepting; radical feminism means more state intrusion into private life |
| Interactionist | Only indirectly — government is a source of labels | Police and teacher training on labelling | Too small-scale to guide national policy |
| New Right | Yes — but towards less state intervention | Breakdown Britain, the two-child limit (2017–2026), 1988 Education Act, Zero Tolerance | Murray confuses correlation with cause; most affected families were in work |
| Postmodern | Largely not interested | 2010 Equality Act, possibly | No basis for criticising any policy at all |
| Late Modern | Yes — policy must adapt to globalisation | New Labour’s Third Way; globalised crime control | Treats political choices as neutral responses to globalisation |
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How social policy comes up in AQA exams
This material sits in Theory and Methods, which is examined in both Paper 1 (Education with Theory and Methods) and Paper 3 (Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods) of AQA specification 7192.
It appears most often in two formats. The first is the 10-mark “outline and explain two” question — for example, two ways in which sociology may influence social policy, or two criticisms of the view that sociologists should work with governments. These need two clearly separated points, each developed properly with an example and a reason, rather than four half-points.
The second is the 20-mark Theory and Methods essay on Paper 3, typically asking you to evaluate the view that sociology can and should influence social policy. This is where the perspectives above earn their keep. A strong answer does not march through every perspective in turn; it organises around the argument — the case for engagement (Positivist, social democratic, and the demonstrable influence of New Right and Late Modern thinking), the case against (Marxist, and the practical barriers), and a judgement that goes beyond “some sociologists think one thing and others think another”.
Two things reliably separate the top band from the middle. One is using the barriers — electoral popularity, ideology, globalisation and cost — as evaluation throughout, rather than as a paragraph on their own. The other is noticing that “can” and “should” are different questions. Sociology demonstrably can influence policy: Townsend, Murray and Giddens all did. Whether it should is the contested part, and answers that keep the two separate read far more sharply than answers that treat them as one.
A third thing helps more than students expect: a contemporary example. Most answers on this topic reach for Thatcher and Breakdown Britain, so an answer that uses the two-child limit — introduced on New Right reasoning in 2017, scrapped on social democratic reasoning in 2026, with a party now pledging to reinstate it — immediately reads as better informed. You only need one or two, used precisely. Vague gestures at “recent government policy” earn nothing.
Social policy also appears in the topic papers. Questions on Families and Households frequently ask about the impact of social policies on family life, and Education questions regularly cover policy from the 1988 Education Reform Act onwards. The perspectives above transfer directly to both.
Sources
Figures and policy dates in this article are drawn from the following. Where a claim comes from a campaigning organisation rather than an official source, that is noted.
Government and Parliament
- HM Government, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty (December 2025) — the Child Poverty Strategy
- House of Commons Library, Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill — figures on families affected and projected cost
- House of Commons Library, Direct taxes: Rates and allowances for 2026/27 — income tax rates, thresholds and the personal allowance freeze
- Acas, Employment Rights Act 2025 — day-one paternity and parental leave
Policy analysis and reporting
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK Poverty 2026 — poverty rates, in-work poverty, and projections after the two-child limit is removed
- BMA, MPs back decriminalisation of abortion — the June 2025 Commons vote, 379 to 137
- Schools Week, Private school VAT raids: what’s the actual impact? — Independent Schools Council census data on fees and pupil numbers
- BBC News — reporting on Reform UK’s position on reinstating the two-child limit
Sociological works referred to
- Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders
- Durkheim, E. (1897) Suicide
- Murray, C. (1990) The Emerging British Underclass
- Townsend, P. (1979) Poverty in the United Kingdom
- Venkatesh, S. (2008) Gang Leader for a Day
- Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level
- Centre for Social Justice (2007) Breakdown Britain
- Tombs, S. and Whyte, D., on corporate crime and regulation