SGI 2024 | United States | Executive Summary

Executive Summary

Recent Governments Experts

SGI experts on United States

Richard Johnson

Dr Richard Johnson is Senior Lecturer in US Politics and Policy at Queen Mary, University of London. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge (BA in Social and Political Sciences) and Nuffield College, Oxford (MPhil in Comparative Government, DPhil in Politics). He has previously been a lecturer at Lancaster University and has taught courses at Cambridge, Oxford, and Beijing Foreign Studies University.

His main research centres on race and democracy in the United States. This was the subject of his book The End of the Second Reconstruction (Polity, 2020), which uncovers the role of political violence, federalism, and the federal judiciary in sabotaging civil rights from the Civil War to the Trump presidency. He has published academic research on elections and campaigning in the US, including on the Voting Rights Act, the communication strategies of African American candidates, Black nationalism and electoral politics, fundraising strategies of working-class candidates, and the role of presidents in midterm elections, as well as on racially polarised partisanship, ‘white flight’ from the Democratic Party, and the Trump administration’s policies on voting rights and incarceration. He is currently writing a textbook on US politics (under contract with Bloomsbury) and a book about the first Black candidates to stand for office in predominantly white electorates between 1966 and 2006 (under contract with Columbia University Press).

Christian Lammert

Christian Lammert is professor of North American politics and policy at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. He recieved his PhD from the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main (2002) with a dissertation on nationalist movements in Quebec and Corsica. He has published widely on topics such as nationalism and regionalism in Quebec, social policy in the United States and the politics of health care reform in the United States. He is currently editing a handbook on the U.S. political system (VS Springer Verlag).

Daniel Béland (Coordinator)

Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. He has held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, the University of Bremen, the University of Nagoya, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Professor Béland currently serves as Executive Editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and President of the Research Committee 19 (Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy) of the International Sociological Association. A student of social and fiscal policy, he has published more than 20 books and 160 peer-reviewed journal articles.

The United States remains the most powerful country in the world. Yet power within the United States is famously fragmented, disjointed, and elusive. The president of the United States holds tremendous symbolic influence, but on closer inspection, actual presidential authority is often highly constrained. To answer Robert Dahl (1961)’s famous question, “Who governs?,” any serious inspection of the government of the United States must include analyses of its formal structures – the president, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, the judiciary, and state and local governments.

A study of “who governs” cannot simply dwell on the institutions. It must consider the actors who place demands on and through those structures – political parties and voters, organized elites and lobbyists, grassroots activists and social movements. These actors seek to use government to achieve specific goals, such as redistributing resources, protecting certain constituencies, enriching themselves, preserving a way of life, or punishing other citizens.

Sustainable governance in the United States is an extremely complex matter, with no straightforward answers. A great deal of focus is placed on the presidential administration, and this is appropriate. The federal executive branch plays a key role in shaping policy through the articulation of national policy goals and wider social objectives. The president oversees a significant array of programs that help promote these goals.

At the same time, presidential administrations are highly constrained. They depend heavily on the legal authority granted by Congress and the funding allocated by Congress to their initiatives. Presidential administrations must also coordinate with other institutions, which may sometimes play a supportive or hostile role, most notably the federal judiciary and lower levels of government. A significant amount of U.S. policymaking originates in the states, resulting in high variation on matters ranging from labor law and welfare provision to environmental protection and civil and voting rights.

Since January 2021, President Joe Biden has demonstrated a significant commitment to sustainable governance initiatives. He has supported the expansion of trade union organizing, the protection of voting rights, the inclusion of diverse social groups into the fabric of American society, and more generous welfare provisions. Biden’s most notable contribution to sustainable governance, however, has been in the field of climate policy. It is not an exaggeration to say that Biden has been the most successful environmentalist president in U.S. history since Richard Nixon, whose administration established the modern framework for federal intervention in environmental and climate policy.

Joe Biden’s legacy has already been established by four major spending bills: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, the Chips and Science Act of 2022, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. These bills collectively provide trillions of dollars for investment in public services, public infrastructure, supply chain resilience, and climate change prevention. The Biden administration’s investment in the public realm and active industrial strategy has not been seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

Citations:

Robert Dahl. 1961. Who Governs? New Haven: Yale University Press.