11. Suzanne B. Mettler, ed., Government, (with Joe Soss and Jacob S. Hacker)
Suzanne Mettler
Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). The authors investigate the complex interactions of economics, politics, and policy in their examination of how postwar distributed economic growth has given way to newer trends: inequalities of income and wealth, politics’ shift to the right, and the increasing role of government in American lives. The authors show how these changes affect the social standing of Americans and the character of democratic citizenship in the United States, examining Medicare, tax policies, low-income women, mass incarceration, and the effect of new policies on participation in the labor force. The authors show that for many disadvantaged Americans for whom the government was a source of opportunity and security, it has in the last three decades instead become paternalistic and punitive.