The introduction argues that Cavell’s democratic perfectionism is uniquely situated to respond to the democratic crisis of post-truth politics. It argues that post-truth politics is a political response to the epistemological problem of skepticism. As a first step in exploring democratic perfectionism, the introduction offers a brief overview of Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism and its salience for politics. Section 2 provides a preliminary sketch of skepticism. Section 3 expands what Cavell means by responsiveness. Section 4 discusses how these two concepts shape democratic perfectionism. Section 5 asks, where is the politics in Cavell’s writings? While Cavell never wrote a text that was explicitly about political philosophy, his thoughts on politics are scattered throughout his writings. An initial obstacle to interpreting his democratic perfectionism is identifying where in his thought to look for those ideas. Section 6 explains how these themes are analyzed throughout the remainder of the book.

This chapter explains the importance of social support for relationship maintenance and individual functioning. It first reviews common stressors (e.g., life events, low socioeconomic status, minority stress and stigma), their accompanying personal and relational costs, and the consequences of social support in adverse or stressful contexts. In particular, this section highlights the different consequences of perceiving support availability and actual support receipt during stress. Next, this chapter reviews the role of supportive relationships to facilitate personal goal pursuit and desired self-change in non-adverse contexts. Finally, this chapter considers social support from the perspective of the support provider and describes how caregiving can be both rewarding and costly.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

In this chapter, we extend the learnings from Chapter 4 to expand your knowledge and skills on reflective practice for building effective and dynamic relationships for partnerships. You will understand how further elements of the TWINE Model of Partnership inform your reflective practice in partnership work. You will also come to learn about tools of reflective practice and how these tools can be useful in helping you to build meaningful relationships that contribute to partnerships with families and communities. This chapter will invite you to challenge yourself by asking key questions that will help you to become a reflective practitioner who builds dynamic relationships with children, families and communities.

Private hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, and the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who staff them provide a large portion of healthcare services in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs). In some, the private sector delivers much more care than the government. Understanding the scale, capacity, quality, constraints and motivations of private providers and private facilities – whether for-profit, non-profit, formal or informal – is critical to assuring that health services and medicines support and expand the goals of access to quality health care for all. This chapter sets out what is known regarding private care provision, from world-class hospitals to unlicensed and untrained village drug-sellers and summarizes the experience and frameworks being applied around the world to measure, regulate, and assure the efficient and effective provision of private health care as part of mixed-health-systems in L&MICs. In many settings the challenges of private sector governance are complicated by limited data, minimal financial transfers, and weak regulatory systems. Despite this, advances have been made in L&MICs to defining and applying good governance strategies.

Contemporary welfare states in advanced post-industrial democracies have been under pressure for some time, dealing with multiple challenges such as population aging, globalization and technological change. Initially, scholars focused on pointing out how a fiscal policy climate of “permanent austerity” (Pierson 2001) constrains the leeway for expansionary reform. Over time, however, observers noted that welfare state retrenchment is not “the only game left in town” (Van Kersbergen et al. 2014). Instead, welfare states have undergone and are still undergoing a significant transformation from a more transfer- and insurance-based model towards a “social investment” model (Bonoli 2013; Hemerijck 2013, 2017, 2018; Morel et al. 2012), in which the creation, mobilization and preservation of human capital and skills are central (Garritzmann et al. 2017). For sure, there are significant cross-country differences in the extent to which the transformation towards the social investment model has occurred, depending on particular institutional, political and socio-economic contexts. Yet, the overall trend is clearly discernible.

Many rich democracies witness a rising tide of populism. With very few exceptions, populist parties have scored electoral successes and often entered national parliaments. In Poland and Hungary, for example, populist parties dominate the respective party system, and in Austria, the FPÖ was part of the previous government coalition. For the first time since the fall of the Nazi regime, a right-wing populist party entered the Bundestag after the 2017 general election in Germany. The most spectacular instance of populist success is probably the presidency of Donald Trump, who won the 2016 US presidential election to the surprise of many observers. Even where populist parties are less successful on Election Day, they sometimes have a strong impact on policies. Brexit is just the most far-reaching example. In reaction to the rise of populism, a wealth of research has emerged. It deals with the most suitable definition of populism, the programmatic outlook of populist parties, supportive attitudes or the social base of the populist vote. Despite the richness of this research, we argue that most approaches to the study of populism fail to integrate fully the insights on unequal representation that have emerged in recent years.

On January 6, 2021, angry supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol building, harassed members of Congress and staff, and mocked democratic symbols. The protestors violently expressed a widespread sentiment among Republican voters that the election was rigged, and that Joe Biden should not be sworn in as the new president of the United States. If democracy depends on the support of those who voted for the losing party to accept the result of the election as legitimate, the events on Capitol Hill showed that this “losers’ consent” (Anderson et al., 2005) is crumbling. Although the degree of polarization in the United States is severe, other advanced democracies face similar challenges. A substantial number of citizens feel that the political system has deep flaws, that politicians have lost touch, and that political decisions do not reflect the preferences of the majority anymore. The chapters in this book highlight the pervasiveness of these problems across a variety of institutional and political settings well beyond the United States.

Many scholars have sounded an alarm about the extent of unequal representation in advanced democracies.1 In Democracy in America? Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens (2017, 68) conclude, “average citizens exert little or no influence on federal government policy” (italics in original). Researchers studying the UnitedStates (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2005; Gilens 2011; Gilens and Page 2014; Gilens 2016; Jacobs and Page 2005; Jacobs and Skocpol 2005; Page and Gilens 2017), Germany (Elässer, Hence, and Schäfer 2017), the Netherlands (Schakel 2019), and other countries (Giger, Rosset and Bernauer 2012) have reached similarly stark conclusions. This research, which finds that those in the upper 10 or 20 percent of the income distribution dominate the policy making process at the expense of those at and below the economic middle, has had a profound influence on academic literature, the media, and even political discourse.2

The attachment and sexual-mating behavioral systems operate jointly within romantic relationships and their reciprocal influences shape relationship quality and longevity. In line with evolutionary models and social perspectives, substantial evidence indicates that men and women differ in the sex-attachment linkage, such that men are more permissive in their sexual attitudes, adopt a more individualistic and pleasure-centered orientation toward sexuality, and are less likely to connect sexual encounters with emotional bonding relative to women. Men's higher sexual urges may also be related to common beliefs which assume that they are constantly interested in having sex, regardless of contextual cues. However, in the context of ongoing relationships, men's sexual motivations may be attuned to relationship goals and shaped by contextual factors such as their partner's responsiveness, attachment-related insecurities, and relationship duration. In this chapter, I present a more complex and nuanced picture of the sex-attachment linkage in men and discuss the multifaceted nature of their sexual desire within the relationship context. I review findings that demonstrate the role of men's sexual desire in the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships and challenge the common notion of the disconnect between men's sexual motivations and attachment needs. I also discuss the ways in which women's perceived responsiveness may shape men's sexual desire and felt security, especially among insecurely attached men. Furthermore, I review findings on the effect of women's displays of desire on men's attachment-related worries and dilemmas. Finally, I present findings on changes over relationship duration in men's sexual desire in committed, long-term relationships and discuss the importance of considering men's age when examining longitudinal effects of their desire and the extent to which men endorse emotional connection in sexual interactions. I conclude by discussing how men may satisfy relationship-related needs within the sexual arena in different relationship stages.

This chapter draws upon Australian prime ministers and their attempt to (re)build trust through their actions regarding two long-term policy issues, asylum-seekers and climate change, as well as an immediate major event occurring during their respective prime ministerships. To help us further ground this analysis, we draw upon data from three prime ministers’ press conferences, examining their responses to questioning within the theoretical lens of trust. The research reveals that building or rebuilding trust is essential in any relationship, but especially so today in terms of political leadership in liberal democracies. They illustrate how competence is regarded as crucial in building trust with colleagues and the public, while integrity is especially important for leaders who enter the job with less perceived legitimacy than a leader who was elected and hence has a mandate to implement their policy platform. Crucially though, a leader who ignores integrity does so at their own peril, as it gives a potential challenger ammunition for a tilt at the leadership position. The leadership needs to send positive messages of unity rather than division and individual aspirations if trust is to be built or rebuilt. In earlier research, we revealed that what one says and how one says it can be important. Politicians who tended to acknowledge successes due to the collective group of their own party, rather than themselves, benefitted greatly in the situations at hand. Thus, (re)building trust becomes more important than ever for political leaders but, perhaps, also more difficult than ever.

Having prudential interests is a matter of possessing features, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure, by which an organism can be concerned about itself. Some organisms lack such features. Sponges have no welfare apparatus; they are unresponsive. A responsive organism may acquire things that are intrinsically good or bad for it. These determine its welfare level, whether over a brief interval of time or over a lifetime, which, in turn, determines whether something is overall good or bad for it. An event or state of affairs E is overall good (bad) for us just if, and to the extent that, the intrinsic value for us of the actual world, in which E occurs, is higher (lower) than that of the closest world in which E does not occur. If the intrinsic value for me of a world w equals my lifetime welfare level in w, then coming into existence, and coming to be responsive, was neither good nor bad for me. If we assume that the intrinsic value for me of a world in which I am unresponsive is 0, then it was good for me to come into existence and to become responsive.