Dennis H. Wrong

A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science.

This essay is written in the belief that it is possible to say both where Max Webers philosophy of social science is mistaken and how these mistakes can be put right. Runciman argues that Webers analysis breaks down at three decisive points: the difference between theoretical pre-suppositions and implicit value-judgements; the manner in which idiographic explanations are to be subsumed under causal laws; and the relation of explanation to description in sociology. The arguments which Weber put forward are fundamental to the methodology of the social sciences, and since his death it has come to be increasingly widely held that with perhaps the sole exception of Mills System of Logic there is still no other body of work of comparable importance in the academic literature on these topics. Runcimans attempt to correct Webers mistakes therefore constitutes in itself a valuable contribution to the philosophy of social science.

Ontario Provincial Elections, 1934–55: A Preliminary Survey of Voting

IN this paper I intend to do little more than sketch in very broad outline some of the main features of the electoral anatomy of the province of Ontario as revealed by the official provincial election returns.l Since I have relied solely on the actual voting record, which is, of course, tabulated by constituencies, my method is ecological and, unlike survey methods, provides only rough and indirect measures of the social and economic factors related to voting behaviour. My findings are entirely descriptive and do not go much beyond what is accessible to any alert newspaper reader who may have followed Ontario politics over the past two decades. The chief methodological problem confronting ecological analysts of voting behaviour is how to equate electoral units with the administrative units by which population characteristics are tabulated in the census. In Ontario the smallest units for which official election statistics are given are polling subdivisions, but these fail to correspond to any units for which data on population characteristics are available. However, data on voting by townships can be derived from the election returns, and the census tabulates population characteristics by townships. I have made some determination of the voting habits of ethnic groups from data on townships, but have not set out these findings in detail in the present paper, which does not analyse units smaller than constituencies, and is thus confined to a very broad scrutiny of differential voting patterns. Ontario constituencies are by no means homogeneous in socio-economic composition. Thus, in the absence of data from surveys or smaller break-downs of the vote by polling subdivisions, it is impossible to arrive at precise and reliable conclusions about the party preferences of the various social groups making up the electorate. Where each constituency is internally heterogeneous and resembles its neighbours very closely in socio-economic composition, one can tell very little about the differential voting patterns of groups from an analysis of the vote by constituencies. However, the internal heterogeneity of the constituencies is not as great an obstacle in Ontario as it would be in a less regionally diversified area (southern England, for example).2