Americans today don't trust each other and their institutions as much as they once did, fueling destructive ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. In Trust in a Polarized Age, political philosopher Kevin Vallier argues that to build social trust and reduce polarization, we must strengthen liberal democratic institutions--high-quality governance, procedural fairness, markets, social welfare programs, freedom of association, and democracy. Theseinstitutions not only create trust, they do so justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic rights.
With increasingly divergent views and commitments, and an all-or-nothing mindset in political life, it can seem hard to sustain the level of trust in other members of our society necessary to ensure our most basic institutions work. This book features interdisciplinary perspectives on social trust. The contributors address four main topics related to social trust. The first topic is empirical and formal work on norms and institutional trust, especially the relationships between trust and human behaviour. The second topic concerns trust in particular institutions, notably the legal system, scientific community, and law enforcement. Third, the contributors address challenges posed by diversity and oppression in maintaining social trust. Finally, they discuss different forms of trust and social trust. Social Trust will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, political science, economics, law, psychology, and sociology.
American politics seems like a war between irreconcilable forces and so we may suspect that political life as such is war. This book confronts these suspicions by arguing that liberal political institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social trust in diverse, open societies, undermining aggressive political partisanship.
In the eyes of many, liberalism requires the aggressive secularization of social institutions, especially public media and public schools. The unfortunate result is that many Americans have become alienated from the liberal tradition because they believe it threatens their most sacred forms of life. This was not always the case: in American history, the relation between liberalism and religion has often been one of mutual respect and support. In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, Kevin Vallier attempts to reestablish mutual respect by developing a liberal political theory that avoids the standard liberal hostility to religious voices in public life. He claims that the dominant form of academic liberalism, public reason liberalism, is far friendlier to religious influences in public life than either its proponents or detractors suppose. The best interpretation of public reason, convergence liberalism, rejects the much-derided "privatization" of religious belief, instead viewing religious contributions to politics as a resource for liberal political institutions. Many books reject privatization, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation is unique in doing so on liberal grounds.
This volume explores the foundations of trust, and whether social and political trust have common roots. Contributions by noted scholars examine how we measure trust, the cultural and social psychological roots of trust, the foundations of political trust, and how trust concerns the law, the economy, elections, international relations, corruption, and cooperation, among myriad societal factors. The rich assortment of essays on these themes addresses questions such as: How does national identity shape trust, and how does trust form in developing countries and in new democracies? Are minority groups less trusting than the dominant group in a society? Do immigrants adapt to the trust levels of their host countries? Does group interaction build trust? Does the welfare state promote trust and, in turn, does trust lead to greater well-being and to better health outcomes? The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust considers these and other questions of critical importance for current scholarly investigations of trust.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.
In these turbulent times, defined by ideological chasms, clashes over social justice, and a pandemic intersecting with misinformation, Americans seem hopelessly divided along fault lines of politics, race, religion, class, and culture. Yet not everyone is accepting the status quo. In Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age, journalist Nathan Bomey paints a forensic portrait of Americans who are spanning gaping divides between people of difference. From clergy fighting racism in Charlottesville to a former Republican congressman engaging conservatives on climate change and Appalachian journalists restoring social trust with the public, these countercultural leaders all believe in the power of forging lasting connections to bring about profound change. Though the blueprints for political, social, and cultural bridges vary widely, bridge builders have much in common—and we have much to learn from them. In this book, Bomey dissects the transformational ways in which bridge builders are combatting polarization by pursuing reconciliation, rejecting misinformation, and rethinking the principle of compromise.
Religious exemptions have a long history in American law, but have become especially controversial over the last several years. The essays in this volume address the moral and philosophical issues that the legal practice of religious exemptions often raises.
Some analysts have called distrust the biggest governmental crisis of our time. It is unquestionably a huge problem, undermining confidence in our elected institutions, shrinking social capital, slowing innovation, and raising existential questions for democratic government itself. What’s behind the rising distrust in democracies around the world and can we do anything about it? In this lively and thought-provoking essay, Donald F. Kettl, a leading scholar of public policy and management, investigates the deep historical roots of distrust in government, exploring its effects on the social contract between citizens and their elected representatives. Most importantly, the book examines the strategies that present-day governments can follow to earn back our trust, so that the officials we elect can govern more effectively on our behalf.
Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda - about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems - reflect differences in individuals' levels of authoritarianism. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. The authors demonstrate that the left and the right have coalesced around these opposing worldviews, which has provided politics with more incandescent hues than before.
