Suzanne Mettler


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.

Education and career

Mettler received a B.A. from Boston College in 1984, a Masters from the University of Illinois in political science, 1989, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in government, 1994. From 1994-2007 she taught at Syracuse University, rising from assistant professor to full professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Department of Political Science. Since July, 2007, she has been the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions, Department of Government, Cornell University.

Works

Mettler co-edited the Oxford Handbook of American Political Development. Mettler subscribes to the subfield of political science called American political development , 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, which studies "the causes, nature, and consequences of key transformative periods and central patterns in American political history," as well the "durable shifts in governing authority" in the United States. Mettler has been described as a prominent Americanist scholar in this relatively new field, which blurs the border between political science and political history. Her particular interests include inequality, democratization and civic engagement. She has written five books, most prominently two winners of the Kammerer Award 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 ther Greatest Generation, 2005, and Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, 1998, which also won the Greenstone Book Prize and the Martha Dertick Book Award. Other books include The Government-Citizen Disconnect ; Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream ; and, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Programs Undermine American Democracy. Mettler has written for a broader audience with publications in New York Times, L.A. Times, Foreign Affairs, andSalon. The election of Trump heightened Mettler's concerns about the future of American democracy. In 2017, Mettler initiated the American Democracy Collaborative, a group of political scientists "who are evaluating the prospects for regime change in the United States."

Selected op-eds and short essays