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This analysis of current social policy approaches and inherited problems identifies the deep social questions which Labour now need to address. It looks at the main party manifestos and the way social issues figured in the 1997 election campaign and the early days of the new government

Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define liberalism and conservatism primarily in terms of social policies closely associated with religious values, each of which invert traditional ideological orientations toward the appropriate size and role of government. The causal mechanism shaping this relationship is authoritarianism, because, I argue, the religious social policy dimension most clearly evokes the deep‐seated value conflicts associated with an authoritarian view of political conflict.

This article focuses on conceptual and methodological problems in the transition from normative conceptions of social rights to more general strategies of social policy. In a discussion of Hartley Dean's article Social Rights and Social Resistance, the author argues that relevant "rights strategies" within social policy in general transcends the traditional dichotomy, assumed by Dean, between structural approaches and more agent‐oriented approaches. In line with this, arguments are presented for the view that the denial of strategies concerning social rights, categorised as opportunistic or anarchistic by Dean, necessitates the formulation of realistic and substantial goal for strivings within social policy. Furthermore, the author claims that the conceptual elaboration of "social rights" does not in itself have any definite and direct consequences for the field of social policy, where material and symbolic power is more relevant. To transcend the criticised approaches of anarchism and opportunism, there still remains to be formulated a strategy of action.