ABSTRACT
The birth cohorts have rarely been used in discussions of politics, and only occasionally in analysis of citizenship. The very existence of the first two cohort studies owed much to that same reforming impulse, the sense that research might be used to help improve society. The minimum people might say in defence of paying attention to politics is that the state influences the context of the cohorts’ experiences. Politics in the two decades after 1945 was largely about extending and consolidating the welfare state. The rudiments had been laid down already, mainly by the Liberal government that was first elected in 1906, although also in the gradual extension of state welfare even during the most difficult circumstances of the 1930s in response to advocacy by ‘middle opinion’. The justification of the social reforms was given in an influential lecture in 1950 by T. H. Marshall, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
