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People with learning disabilities may experience discrimination which prevents them from exercising choice and control over their right to participate in democratic processes. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Taking data collected by social workers during a campaign from the 2015 UK General Election, this paper analyses the variables associated with higher rates of democratic participation by people with learning disabilities.

The present authors undertook secondary analysis on data collected by social workers supporting adults with learning disabilities who were living in community housing units. In total, 1,019 people with learning disabilities who were living in 124 community housing units in one English county gave consent to participate. In total, 84 per cent were registered to vote and 26 per cent cast a vote on polling day. People were significantly more likely to cast a vote if they lived in a housing unit where they understood their rights (Wald χ² =4.896, p=0.027).

The analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that supporting people with learning disabilities to understand their right to participate in elections increases the likelihood they will cast a vote on a polling day. There are practical implications from this finding for commissioning practices, support planning, and education of health and social care practitioners.

This is the first study of this size which examines data from people with learning disabilities on their experience of democratic participation and the role of social work.

This essay examines the issues that the ongoing revolution in biosciences and biotechnology pose to social science. A convenient frame for examining these issues is the framework of “thematic priorities” established by the British funding agency for social science, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). These “thematic priorities” are used to identify major challenges and opportunities that currently confront social research. Though not constructed as part of a futures exercise, this framework proved useful for organising the issues that were generated from literature review and brainstorming, provided a stimulus to identify new issues, and was a useful filter for presenting results to the ESRC, which sponsored the study. This range of issues does not just call for interaction between natural and social scientists: there is also need for the sharing of knowledge and perspectives across diverse fields of social science. In order to help inform future research priorities, we need to move beyond the perspectives of single disciplines, and make sure that we do not simply emphasise those areas where social scientists have already been actively engaged. The study concludes clearly that there is a huge range of vital questions that social science needs to address if we are to understand, let alone bring more social intelligence to bear on shaping, the scientific and technological revolutions that are under way, and their broader social implications.

Argues that the developments in UK supermarket practice in recent years have resulted in a distinctive system of retailing in the UK, and that this has some important consequences for how one assesses the nature of competition in this market. In particular it means that standard approaches to assessing consumer benefits and the presence or absence of anti‐competitive behaviour may not be appropriate. It is argued that UK supermarkets are delivering a quite different offering to the marketplace from a simple “basket of goods” with a specific price and quality. The issues of product range, innovation potential, and associated convenience factors are all part of the package. This leads to a consideration of the questions of “What is competing with what?” and “Who is competing with whom?”: the issue of comparing like with like. From there we arrive at the question of how competition policy in this field needs to consider long‐term innovation potential as well as short‐term price issues.

Building on a recent study of Weiner's (1985a) attribution–emotion–behavior model, we examine the extent to which negative affective states mediate the relationship between attributions for undesirable outcomes and the ability to justify ethically questionable behaviors. Results of a scenario-based study indicated that causal attributions were associated with affective states and behavioral justification in the general manner predicted. Affective states were not associated with behavior justification, however, indicating that only a direct association between attributions and justification existed. Implications for future research on attributions and emotions are discussed.