Suzanne Mettler is an American political scientist and author, known for her research about the way Americans view and respond to the government in their lives, and helping to stimulate the study of American political development.
Mettler co-edited the Oxford Handbook of American Political Development (2016). Mettler subscribes to the subfield of political science called American political development (APD), which recognizes the need for an analytic approach to researching and understanding U.S. politics. She feels there is a distinctiveness of the APD approach,[3] which studies "the causes, nature, and consequences of key transformative periods and central patterns in American political history,"[4] as well the "durable shifts in governing authority" in the United States.[5] Mettler has been described as a prominent Americanist scholar in this relatively new field, which blurs the border between political science and political history.[6] Her particular interests include inequality, democratization and civic engagement.[7] She has written five books, most prominently two winners of the Kammerer Award[8] of the American Political Science Association for the best book on U.S. national policy: Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation, 2005 (Oxford University Press), and Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, 1998 (Cornell University Press), which also won the Greenstone Book Prize[9] and the Martha Dertick Book Award.[10] Other books include The Government-Citizen Disconnect (Russell Sage 2018); Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books 2014); and, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Programs Undermine American Democracy (University of Chicago 2011). Mettler has written for a broader audience with publications in New York Times, L.A. Times, Foreign Affairs, and Salon. The election of Trump heightened Mettler's concerns about the future of American democracy.[11] In 2017, Mettler initiated the American Democracy Collaborative, a group of political scientists "who are evaluating the health of democracy in the United States".[12]
Selected op-eds and short essays
"Our Hidden Government Benefits", The New York Times, September 11, 2011[13]
"Why Skimp On the G.I. Bill", Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2011[14]
^Lieberman, Robert; Mettler, Suzanne; Pepinsky, Thomas B.; Roberts, Kenneth M.; Valelly, Richard (2017-08-29). "Trumpism and American Democracy: History, Comparison, and the Predicament of Liberal Democracy in the United States". Rochester, NY. SSRN3028990. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)