Chapter 9 considers the strengths and weaknesses of pluralist theory as an account of the media’s role in a democracy. It suggests that several changes and additions are necessary to make it more complete and to bring it up to date with the digital age. The second part of the chapter uses this more complete account of pluralism to assess the role of the media in British democracy. It picks out what effects the media have and do not have and makes some suggestions about future research.

Chapter 6 traces the meaning of ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic policies. ‘Modernising the economy’ to achieve sustainable growth was a consistently crucial idea for Labour from Wilson to Blair. Notwithstanding the abandonment of nationalisation, the endurance of state-led ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic imaginary reveals a continuing strategic role for the state, even for New Labour. After establishing this continuity, the chapter highlights a crucial change. In the 1970s and 1980s, Labour policymakers assumed that manufacturing was the key sector to ‘modernise’. Yet, under the influence of deindustrialisation, ideas of ‘post-Fordism’, and New Keynesianism, by the early 2000s manufacturing had been usurped by ‘human capital’. For New Labour, education and training became the new ‘commanding heights’ and the foremost economic priority for the active state. These developments show the ongoing influence of technocratic, social-democratic thought worlds, and thus expose the inappropriateness of shoehorning New Labour into ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. But they also speak to important, and ambivalent, shifts in British political economy by the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the role of behavioural incentives as influencing healthcare delivery. It describes decision-making in clinical contexts and the roles of biases that naturally occur in these settings. Sometimes these have negative impacts (e.g., medical errors) and other times positive impacts (e.g., role of social norms for positive change). Pay for performance (P4P) programmes are discussed in this context. This chapter also includes examples of interventions such as defaults in the electronic health record and how antibiotic prescribing programmes that use social norms can be important to change behaviours. However, they need to be applied carefully and in concert with clinical collaboration.

Populism is a political strategy that relies on the use of a personalistic political organization and mass communication to mobilize support in the quest for power; it will be most successful when it is more cost-effective than the alternatives of programmatic political party building or the distribution of patronage. The costs involved in this trade-off come in two forms: direct costs and indirect (or transaction) costs. In politics, very often transaction costs – search, bargaining, and enforcement costs – are the higher ones. Populists lower the costs of mobilizing support by communicating directly with voters instead of working through intermediaries such as party professionals or political brokers. The populist strategy will be most effective when two conditions are met. First, potential voters or supporters must be available for direct mobilization. This means that they must be relatively free of existing party attachments. Second, the opposition should be divided. Most populists win with the backing of a mere plurality rather than a majority. The more the opposition is split between multiple contenders, the more economically viable is the populist strategy.

Chapter 2 lays out the book’s intellectual, theoretical and methodological foundations. It outlines in more detail the working definitions of contested concepts such as ‘right-wing populism’ and ‘religion’ used in this study and frames them within the existing academic literature. It briefly explains the book’s demand- and supply-side analytical framework, the sources this research is based on, the methods employed to analyse these sources, and the rationale of selecting Germany, France and the United States as the case studies for this book. Overall, Chapter 2 contains essential details about the mechanics underlying this research.

There is not a single populism but diverse populisms which respond to different local concerns. However, most populisms are configured around at least two of the following societal concerns: (1) a sense of economic insecurity and status anxiety; (2) xenophobic attitudes toward ‘Others’, in particular migrants and refugees; (3) disenchantment with incumbent political elites, combined with the perception that the establishment is arrogant, remote and insensitive to the needs of “real people”; (4) resentment against globalization, internationalism, and renewed support for nationalism (economic and other); (5) cultural and religious resentment, expressed in anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment and anti-secularist views; and (6) impatience with liberal constraints upon government, and frustration with checks and balances that are viewed as institutional obstacles to “getting things done”. It is emphasized that in exploring the causes of successful populism one must focus not only on the "demand side" but also on the "supply side" of political populism.