Society From the Top Down

Reform’s Donations are not Normal

computational social science

Reform UK have been in the news again. This time because of ‘mega donations’ - as everyone in the news media seems to be calling them - from two cryptocurrency billionaires…

Strange Freedom

I’ve been listening to the Culture, Power, Politics podcast which recently produced a four episode marathon on neoliberalism. If you don’t know Culture, Power, Politics I…

Capitalist Power in Post-War Croydon

Can I just shock you? I like Croydon. Have to admit I’ve been down on the place in the past. Perhaps not for good reasons, but at least for understandable reasons. It’s not…

Paul Sweezy’s Corporate Interest Groups Revisited

intellectual history

network analysis

computational social science

In this post I revisit pioneering work by the American Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in which he examined a network of the largest US companies in 1935, identifying eight…

Media Use Amongst the Public and Political Elite

There aren’t that many book that change how you think about the world. But one that had a big impact on me while I was researching my PhD was Aeron Davis’s The Mediation of…

Conspiracy of Silence

Following the latest Epstein disclosures the political fate of the Prince of Darkness dominated headlines and news bulletins for days. It forced the resignation of…

Network Analysis and the Paranoid Style

network analysis

It’s all connected man! Conspiracy theory can give network analysis a bad name. But that’s not because network analysis is inherently flawed as a method. As I noted in a prev…

Capital and Conservatism

I was trying to dig something up from my Twitter feed the other day and came across this talk I did back in 2021 for a panel at The World Transformed called ‘How Do We…

Labour Together’s Donor Network

network analysis

computational social science

In this post I’ll produce a network revealing the relationship between donors to the right-wing Labour think tank, Labour Together, and other politicians and political…

Welcome!

Welcome to Society from the Top Down. In case you don’t know, I’m Tom Mills, a sociologist and socialist in the UK. This is a new website where I will post my general…