This chapter examines how the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP) came to support the process of financial liberalization, while serving in a coalition government between 1987 and 1991. Financial liberalization is widely perceived as emblematic of a neoliberal turn in reformist politics. The chapter examines how a practical social democracy approach can shed light on the interaction between ideology, practical challenges, and coalitional imperatives that shaped policy-making and led to the SDP’s endorsement of financial liberalisation in Finland. It analyses these reforms in the context of the Finnish political economy and the development of social democratic economic policy. The chapter shows that financial liberalisation was debated extensively within the party and the government. The policy reforms were justified as a solution to key practical challenges, but also as a way for the SDP to promote traditional social democratic objectives. The chapter considers the implications of this case for understanding the embrace of markets by social democratic parties.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

The British Labour Party is unique among social democratic parties in the way that over the past generation programmatic change has, rather than being incremental, been sudden and sharp, taking the form of paradigm shifts, as the term is understood by Peter Hall. This brief survey of the party over the last thirty years uncovers four actual or attempted paradigm displacements under the leaderships of Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer. The chapter argues that Labour’s propensity for paradigm shifts is due to two principal factors: fluctuations in social learning processes and instabilities in institutional settings, in particular the structure of power within the party. It finds that the learning process, while to a degree evidence-based, is inherently both subjective and political, with much depending on how problems are framed and the lessons of the past interpreted. But the most important variable explaining why Labour is prone to a greater extent than other social democratic parties to ideological volatility is the fluidity of its power structure which, in turn, reflects its institutional structure, especially its pluralist and federal character.

Agriculture has been an unloved policy area in the history of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). Already lying at the intersection of interest-based constituency politics, party ideology, electioneering, fiscal and trade policy, economics, welfare, and government coalition-making, farm policy became even more complicated when the geopolitical question of European agricultural integration arose in the 1950s. Throughout, the SPD remained concerned that farmers could rise against democracy if their demands went unmet. The SPD’s policy preference was for economic rationalisation and low agricultural tariffs, mitigated by an active (but not excessive) welfare policy for farmers. Instead, government support for farmers and agricultural protectionism actually increased under SPD-led governments in the 1920s and again in 1969–1974. Political objectives to attract farm support and lessen rural antagonism towards social democracy ran against the party’s policy preferences. In the exercise of practical social democracy, choices have to be made. This chapter argues that, in the end, agricultural policy proved to be a second-order policy. Party leadership bartered the SPD’s preferred agricultural policy away to gain the political breathing space they needed to carry on in government and implement first-order priorities that lay closer to their hearts.

This concluding chapter discusses the main contributions of the volume, notably the implications of adopting a practical approach to social democracy. It also considers the key analytical lessons from the chapters for understanding the evolution of reformist politics, policy-making as well as the role rhetoric, language, and ideology. It also reflects on the wider implications of this agenda by examining its relevance to other parts of the world, such as Latin America (Brazil) and East Central Europe (Poland), and other policy areas, notably immigration. The analysis implies that the core logic of practical social democracy could be applicable across a wide range of countries and policy areas, but it also highlights that the specific nature of the feasible trade-offs between governance, electoral, and organisational imperatives vary across such settings and over time, thereby contributing to the diversity of reformist parties and policies.

This chapter compares the development of pension regimes in Sweden and Denmark to demonstrate how variable political and economic constraints shaped social democratic policy choices. Social democratic parties in both countries have tried to pursue broadly similar policy strategies (tax-financed basic pensions; state-run, earnings-related pensions with publicly controlled pension funds). Swedish social democrats prevailed, at least for several decades, while their Danish counterparts turned to collective bargaining to pursue worker influence on the investment of pension capital when the legislative route was blocked. These trajectories demonstrate the role of learning and compromise by social democratic parties. In neither country were social democrats able to achieve a parliamentary majority, so legislative success required bargaining with other parties and with their trade union allies. Moreover, social democratic parties faced dilemmas concerning unanticipated pension policy legacies. Swedish social democrats had to compromise with other parties in the 1998 reform to address weaknesses in the ATP pension system. Danish social democrats faced tougher electoral constraints and have been unable to match the electoral performance of their Swedish counterparts. With the legislative route closed off, Danish social democrats lined up behind capital-funded, earnings-related pension solution based on collective bargaining.

The chronicle of European social democracy is often told from the perspective of the party leader. If the party triumphs at the polls, it is surely because the leader is a visionary. If, on the other hand, the party loses elections, weak leaders are held responsible for that misfortune. Clearly, leadership matters but perhaps not in the top-down manner it used to. Drawing on the literature on political leadership and the Europeanisation of public policy, this chapter argues that the collaborative approach to statecraft deployed by the Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa in the period 2015–2019 paved the way for a period of political stability and electoral victory of the Socialist Party. Using the method of process-tracing to analyse official documents, parliamentary debates, and media reports, the chapter shows that collaborative statecraft enabled Costa to get four budgets approved, to complete a four-year mandate while leading a minority government, and to win the elections of 2019. The chapter also shows that the abandonment of collaborative statecraft in the period 2019–2023 resulted in greater political uncertainty and contributed to the socialists’ defeat at the 2024 elections.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

Chapter 2 explores the rise of the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. This flagship initiative aimed at doing exactly what its titles suggests, and has drawn international acclaim – alongside critique and concern. In attending to its underpinnings, I highlight the managerial and clinical trends IAPT drew from and extended to proliferate therapy at scale. I examine how features of IAPT understood to be novel came to be regarded as vital forms of infrastructure around which other psychological services should be built. I also illustrate how the economic logics that underpinned IAPT initially resulted in particular kinds of therapy being rolled out for certain types of conditions experienced by specific groups; most notably, CBT for anxiety and depression diagnosed in adults of working age. The chapter reflects on the ramifications of IAPT, including in relation to the understandings of the nature of ill-health that result from it.

In Chapter 1, I demonstrate how professional claims-making operates as a form of boundary work that both configures and is configured by the evolving identity of clinical psychology. The keenness of many in the field to position it as different from psychiatry is illuminated, with the ‘diagnostic’ approach deemed particularly problematic by many leading clinical psychologists. Likewise, I spotlight how some in clinical psychology also labour to differentiate it from other psychological traditions (like counselling psychology and health psychology). This includes through the development of a professional body solely for clinical psychologists: the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP-UK). Ultimately, these forms of boundary-work help to configure the nature and practices of clinical psychology. Accordingly, they also have implications for the values and perspectives of individual therapists, and the kinds of care that patients are (not) able to access.

Chapter 4 analyses how clinical psychologists preface (potential) care through negotiations of referrals and acts of assessment prior to any kind of therapy. I regard these as key ‘uncertainty moments’ in which practitioners must decide whether to see a patient for therapy. This decision-making process depends on far more than an ‘objective’ evaluation of the patient in front of them. Resolution of uncertainty entails the reciprocal configuration of at least three kinds of ontologies: the ontology of a potential patient, the ontology of the service in which they work, and the ontology of their profession. These are not necessarily stable; rather, they can be remade over time and in relation to particular service users (demonstrating how visions and adjudications of therapeutic need are highly contextualised). Such ‘prefacing practices’ contribute to the denial of access for some patients, although even exclusions might themselves sometimes be accounted for by professionals as forms of care.

In this Introduction, I sketch out the rise of a transnational ethic of access to treatments for ill-health, and how it configures and is configured by mental healthcare in the UK. The instantiation of this ethic has resulted in policy and clinical attention to enhancing access to psychological therapy (often cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, specifically). I introduce the importance of clinical psychology within this context and chart its consolidation as a profession, alongside a discussion of the role of CBT within the UK. I also discuss the wider entanglements of psychological praxis and societies, and the theoretical perspectives that propel the analysis presented in this book. I conclude with outlining the various chapters that follow.