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Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations
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Dr Richard Johnson, BA (Cambridge), MPhil (Oxford), DPhil (Oxford)

Richard

Senior Lecturer in US Politics & Policy

Email: Richard.johnson@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne, 2.01
X: @richardmarcj

Profile

Richard Johnson’s work spans US and British politics and history. His US-focused work analyses racial and ethnic politics, elections and voting behaviour, political institutions and policymaking, federalism, and the US Constitution. His British politics scholarship focuses on Labour Party history, Euroscepticism, and the British constitution. Across both domains, his interests lie in elections, inequality, policymaking, sovereignty, and constitutions.

Richard Johnson was appointed to Queen Mary in 2020. Previously, he had been a lecturer at Lancaster University. He was educated at Cambridge (BA in Social and Political Sciences) and Oxford (MPhil in Comparative Government, DPhil in Politics). He has taught courses on US, UK, and comparative politics to university students at Queen Mary, Lancaster, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Virginia, and Beijing Foreign Studies University.

US Politics

One major area of Johnson’s work focuses on race and democracy in the United States. This was the subject of his book The End of the Second Reconstruction: Obama, Trump, and the Crisis of Civil Rights (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 race and electoral politics in the US, including on the Voting Rights Act, the communication strategies of African American candidates, racial stereotyping of Asian American candidates (with Neil Visalvanich), Black nationalism and electoral politics,  racially polarised partisanship, ‘white flight’ from the Democratic Party, the changing racial and ethnic composition of the Republican Party, and the Trump administration’s policies on voting rights.

He has also published academic articles about race and US education policy, including the reception of private school vouchers in urban communities, school district secession and its impact on school re-segregation (with Desmond King), and affirmative action in US higher education.

Richard Johnson has also published on a variety of other topics in US politics, including the fundraising strategies of working-class candidates, the role of presidents in midterm elections, the parliamentarisation of US party politics, Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to bypass standard executive branch decision-making procedures (with Osman Sahin and Umut Korkut), the conservative policy bias of US Senate malapportionment (with Lisa Miller), the US campaign to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s (with Sam Mallinson), the judicial politics of abortion, and political failures of the American Left. He is also the author of a textbook, US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol University Press, 2021).

UK Politics

Richard Johnson’s other area of scholarship is UK politics, especially Labour Party history. He is the co-author (with Mark Garnett & Gavin Hyman) of Keeping the Red Flag Flying: The Labour Party in Opposition since 1922 (Polity, 2024). Richard has an interest in Labour biography and has written profiles of prominent Labour figures for Tribune, including Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Peter Shore, and Anne Kerr, as well as a reflection on Englishness and the Left. He is also a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, writing the entries on the Labour MPs Austin Mitchell and Alice Mahon.

Johnson has published extensive academic research on Labour and Europe, including British women’s opposition to the Common Market, Labour’s changing policy on Europe under Neil Kinnock, John Smith’s pro-Europeanism, the history of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, and the ‘internationalist euroscepticism’ of Overseas Development Minister Judith Hart.

Richard Johnson has also published on other topics in British politics, including Theresa May’s record on LGBT rights, Jeremy Corbyn’s foreign policy outlook (with Mark Garnett), the 1965 Leyton by-election, and (with Ron Johnston and Iain McLean) different systems of proportional representation.

Richard Johnson has published two edited books on the British constitution. The first is Sceptical Perspectives on the Changing Constitution of the United Kingdom (Hart, 2023), edited with Yuan Yi Zhu. The second is Strengthening the Political Constitution (Policy Exchange, 2025). Johnson has written chapters in both defending Britain’s political constitution. He has also published a journal article on the limits of devolution for the Left.

Richard is co-host (with Lee Evans) of ‘Since Attlee & Churchill’, a podcast about British contemporary politics and British history since the Second World War.

Teaching

POL254 – US Politics

POL399 – Race and US Politics

POLM100 – US Public Policy

Research

Research Interests:

  • US politics, especially race and elections, partisanship, voting behaviour, judicial power, policymaking, and federalism.
  • UK politics, especially Labour Party history, Britain, the European Union, and the British. constitution.

Examples of research funding:

  • BA/Leverhulme Small Grant for project on the comparative politics of busing in the US, UK, and France (2023-24)
  • Research England Talent and Research Stabilisation Fund for project on the political constitution (2023)
  • Churchill Archives By-Fellow (Churchill College, Cambridge University) (2022)
  • Policy Entrepreneur Grant for research on the history of Euroscepticism in the Labour Party (2020)
  • Quality-Related Research Strategic Priorities Fund Grant (Research England) for a project on UK constitutional reform (2020)
  • Political Studies Association (PSA) APSA Panel Award (2020)
  • British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Teaching American Studies Grant (2019)
  • Research Travel Grant from the University of Kansas (Bob Dole Institute) for research about the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 (2016)

Publications

Books

  • US Politics: The Search for Power (Bloomsbury, under contract)
  • Neither a Militant Nor a Moderate: Black Candidates, White Voters, and Racial Campaign Strategies, 1966-2006 (Columbia University Press, under contract)
  • Keeping the Red Flag Flying: Labour in Opposition since 1922 (Polity, 2024), with Mark Garnett & Gavin Hyman
  • US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol University Press, 2021)
  • The End of the Second Reconstruction: Obama, Trump, and the Crisis of Civil Rights (Polity, 2020)

Edited Volumes

  • Strengthening the Political Constitution (Policy Exchange, 2025)
  • Sceptical Perspectives on the Changing Constitution of the United Kingdom (Bloomsbury/Hart, 2023), with YY Zhu (eds)

Journal Articles

  • ‘Are Ethnic and Racial Minorities Abandoning the Democrats?’, Journal of American Studies (in press)
  • ‘Using Race to Diminish Race’s Relevance’, Journal of School Choice (2025)
  • ‘Good at Math: Andrew Yang, Asian Americans, and Racialized Campaign Rhetoric’, Global Discourse 15:2-3 (2025), 239-262, with Neil Visalvanich
  • ‘What’s Left?’ in ‘Roundtable: Scholarly Perspectives on the American Right’, Journal of American Studies 58:4 (2024)
  • ‘The limits of devolution for the left’, Progressive Review 31:1, 50-55 (Spring 2024)
  • ‘Women Against the Common Market’, Journal of Contemporary British History 38:1 (2024), 23-44.
  • ‘The Conservative Policy Bias of US Senate Malapportionment’, PS: Political Science and Politics 56:1 (2023), with Lisa Miller
  • ‘The Discourses of the Anti-Apartheid Sanctions Movement in the United States, 1972-1986’, Safundi 23:3-4 (2022), with Samuel Mallinson
  • ‘Dobbs v Jackson and the Revival of the States’ Rights Constitution’, Political Quarterly 93:4 (2022), 612-619
  • ‘School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America’, Urban Affairs Review 58:2 (2022), 563-596
  • ‘The 1982 Voting Rights Extension as a Critical Juncture: Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and Republican Party-Building’, Studies in American Political Development 35:2 (2021), 223-238
  • ‘Policy-making by Tweets: Discursive Governance, Populism, and the Trump Presidency’, Contemporary Politics 27 (2021), with Umut Korkut & Osman Sahin
  • ‘Race Was a Motivating Factor: Re-segregated schools in the American states’, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 35:1 (2019), with Desmond King
  • ‘Proudly for Brooke: Race-Conscious Campaigning in 1960s Massachusetts’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 3:2 (2018), 261-292
  • ‘Hamilton’s Deracialization: Barack Obama’s Racial Politics in Context’, Du Bois Review 14:2 (2017), 621-638
  • ‘Overrepresenting UKIP, Underrepresenting the Greens and Lib Dems: The 2014 European Elections in Great Britain’, Representation 50:4 (2014), with Iain McLean & Ron Johnston

Chapters in edited volumes

  • 'The Persistent Significance of Race: Disputing the Racial Depolarisation Thesis’ in R Hansen & K Johnson (eds) Race, Illiberalism, and the State (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
  • ‘1872’ in I Dale (ed) US Presidential Elections (Biteback, forthcoming)
  • ‘Colour-Blind Utopianism and Affirmative Action’ in S Bray (ed) Les Etats Désunis (Atlante, forthcoming)
  • 'Race, Class, and Changing Voter Coalitions' in P Adorf & M Turek (eds) The Endgame: The 2024 Presidential Election in the United States (Palgrave, forthcoming)
  • ‘Party, Race, and Campaign Appeals’, in G Peele, J Herbert, R La Raja, A Wroe (eds) Developments in American Politics 10 (Palgrave, forthcoming)
  • ‘Judith Hart: Labour’s Internationalist Eurosceptic’ in M Broad & W King (eds) The Labour Party and European Integration: A Biographical Approach (Bristol University Press, 2025)
  • ‘Leyton, 1965’ in I Dale (ed) By-Elections: 88 electoral contests that shook British politics (Biteback, 2025)
  • ‘The Racial and Ethnic Composition of the American Right’ in J Aberbach, B Cain, D King, & G Peele (eds) The Changing Character of the American Right: Ideology, Politics, and Policy in the Trump Era (Palgrave, 2025)
  • ‘Midterm Elections and the Modern Presidency: Parliamentary Party Leadership in a Separation of Powers System’ in R Duda & M Turek (eds) The Crossroads Election: European Perspectives on the 2022 Midterm Elections in the United States (Routledge, 2024)
  • ‘John Smith: Labour’s Most Pro-European Leader’ in K Hickson (ed) John Smith: Old Labour’s Last Hurrah? (Biteback, 2024)
  • ‘The Case for the Political Constitution’ (with Yuan Yi Zhu) in R Johnson & YY Zhu (eds) Sceptical Perspectives on the Changing Constitution of the United Kingdom (Hart, 2023)
  • ‘Theresa May and LGBT Rights’ in A Roe-Crines (ed) Statecraft: The Leadership of Theresa May (Palgrave, 2023)
  • ‘The European Parliamentary Labour Party: From Anti to Pro’ in D Hayter & D Hartley (eds) The Forgotten Tribe: British MEPs, 1979-2020 (Harper, 2022)
  • ‘The Favourite Son’s Favourites: Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Home State Effect in the 1982 Midterm Elections’ in P Andelic, M McLay, R McLay (eds) Midterms and Mandates (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
  • ‘Neil Kinnock and Labour’s European Policy’ in K Hickson (ed) Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? (Routledge, 2022)
  • ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Foreign Policy’ in A Roe-Crines (ed) Corbynism in Perspective: The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn (Agenda, 2021), with Mark Garnett
  • ‘Low-Resource Candidates and Fundraising Appeals’ in B Grofman, E Suchay, & A Treschel (eds) Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2020)
  • ‘Racial Policy Under Trump’ in M Oliva & M Shanahan (eds) The Trump Presidency: From Campaign Trail to World Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
  • ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration’ in G Peele, C Bailey, J Herbert, B Cain, & B G Peters (eds) Developments in American Politics 8 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
  • 'Racially Polarised Partisanship and the Obama Presidency’ in E Ashbee & J Dumbrell (eds) The Obama Presidency and the Politics of Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Edited Journal Roundtables

  • (edited with Josephine Harmon), ‘Roundtable: Scholarly Perspectives on the American Right’, Journal of American Studies 58:4 (2024)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Articles

  • Alice Mahon, 1937-2022 (in press)
  • Austin Mitchell, 1934-2021 (2025)

Book Reviews

  • ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs (2023)
  • ‘Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2018)

Supervision

Current PhD Students:

Darren Bowes, The Eisenhower Administration and the School Desegregation Crisis, 1954-57 (Lancaster University, Northwest ESRC Doctoral Training Studentship, 2019-23)

Matthew Schlachter, Saving the RINO: The Survival of Moderates in the Republican Party (UCL, 2021-25)

Topics:

I am interested in supervising PhD students on topics relating to US domestic politics, including elections, campaigns, political parties, public policy, and political institutions, especially with a dimension on race. Historically minded and APD (American Political Development) proposals are particularly welcomed.

I would also be interested in supervising PhD students writing on British Labour Party history and politics, especially with reference to the European Union, and on the British constitution, especially the idea of the ‘political’ constitution.

 

Public Engagement

The Critic

- ‘Strengthening the Political Constitution’ (March 2025)

- ‘Don’t Hobble the House’ (July 2023)

-  ‘The Dangers of Devolution’ (December 2022)

-  ‘Labour and Monarchy’ (September 2022)

Fabian Review

- ‘Labour in Opposition’ (Spring 2024)

The Globe Post

The Guardian

The Independent

Jacobin

Labour List

Political Insight

Spectator

The Telegraph

Tribune

Unherd

Academic Blogs (selection)

9DashLine

Briefings for Brexit

The Conversation

Democratic Audit

Discover Society

The Interpreter (Lowy Institute, Australia)

The Loop (European Consortium for Political Research)

LSE US Politics & Policy Blog

Lux et Data, Institution for Social & Policy Studies (Yale)

Mile End Institute

Open Democracy

OxPol (Oxford University Politics Department Blog)

Political Studies Association

Polity

Public Seminar

Transforming Society

The UK in a Changing Europe (ESRC funded blog on the EU Referendum)

Performance

Impact

As a scholar of political institutions and democracy, I am interested in how democratic power can be maximised to achieve positive social and economic change. While much commentary about constitutions emphasises the importance of ‘checks’ on majority government, my work on US and UK politics has instead led me to value the empowering of democratic majorities.

I am influenced by the comparative political science literature which considers constitutional ‘checks’ to act as ‘veto points’, or institutional hurdles, to the passage of legislation. Veto points tend to inhibit the expression of popular majorities. The more veto points in the system, the more challenging it is to pass large-scale redistributive social policy and other policies aimed at improving the collective good.

I also find that fear of ‘majority tyranny’ is often overstated. Domination by unaccountable elites is almost always more dangerous to democracy than empowered democratic majorities. This was the finding of my book The End of the Second Reconstruction, which argued that multi-racial democracy was not undone by majorities but by elite minorities given undue and unaccountable power in institutions like the Supreme Court and US Senate.

In my work on the British constitution, I have principally defended three key ideas: (1) parliamentary sovereignty, (2) House of Commons primacy within Parliament, and (3) majoritarian party government. The basic premise of my work is that the British constitution, unencumbered by a codified constitution, permits the UK Parliament unusually broad policymaking power. The primacy of the House of Commons within Parliament (over the unelected House of Lords) enables majority governments to drive through transformative social and economic reforms, with virtually no further formal constitutional or legal limitations. Since the 1990s, we have seen a variety of constitutional reforms which seek to diminish parliamentary sovereignty, as well as proposals to weaken the primacy of the House of Commons (by reforming the upper chamber) and to introduce permanent coalition government (through proportional representation).

My edited collection, Sceptical Perspectives on the Changing Constitution of the United Kingdom (with Yuan Yi Zhu of Leiden University), published in 2023, provided a critique of these reforms. I have also edited a collection on Strengthening the Political Constitution, published by Policy Exchange in 2025, which unpacks the case for parliamentary sovereignty.

 

1. Protecting the Primacy of the House of Commons

The primacy of the House of Commons was a hard-fought victory of democratic campaigners in the twentieth century. The idea of House of Commons primacy dates back centuries, whereby it was long understood that finance bills ought to originate with the Commons. MPs were rightly seen as more representative of the people than the aristocratic House of Lords. In the twentieth century, the UK government enshrined this principle into law in two important statues the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, expanding the primacy of the Commons from finance bills to virtually all matters of legislation.

Defenders of Commons primacy are, in effect, either unicameralists or quasi-unicameralists. In other words, they do not support the idea of an upper chamber being able to act as a decisive ‘veto point’ against the Commons. There are two ways to protect this principle. One is to abolish the upper chamber entirely (without replacement), as is the case in many Scandinavian countries and in the devolved parliaments.

The other is to maintain the unelected and unrepresentative character of the House of Lords, politically weakening its ability to make some kind of claim over the primacy of the Commons. Paradoxically, democrats and socialists in the twentieth century often opposed efforts to make the House of Lords elected or more representative because, as Labour Deputy Leader Herbert Morrison once said, it was its democratic ‘absurdity’ that was the democratic safeguard. Feminists, like Jennie Lee MP, argued against the appointment of women. Socialists argued against the removal of the hereditary peers.

It is in this vein that my work on House of Lords reform sits.  By arguing against efforts to elect the upper chamber or to make it more representative, I am seeking to protect the primacy of the House of Commons. I have these points many times in public fora, including in an interview about the House of Lords on GB News, in a featured long-form article for the print version of the Critic magazine, and in an episode on my podcast Since Attlee and Churchill, ‘What Use is the House of Lords Anyway?’. I welcome other opportunities to make these arguments.

 

2. Empowering Majorities in the House of Commons

The British system is unusual – although not unique – in the parliamentary world with its legislature being derived from single-member constituencies elected under the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system. Campaigners for Proportional Representation (PR) rest their arguments on the simple idea that the share of votes cast for a party in an election should roughly correspond to the share of seats which that party holds in the legislature.

While this is a facially attractive argument, I have argued (including in public fora like this TV debate with Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine and this TV interview) that it is fairly limited and superficial. British parliamentary elections are not merely exercises in filling the legislature. They are choices over the future government of the country. In PR systems, choices about government formation are made after the election by political elites. MPs strike post-election bargains to form coalitions, often jettisoning the policy platform on which they had just stood. Under First Past the Post, the public have a reasonable expectation of knowing which parties can plausibly form a majority government. Therefore, the manifesto becomes a programme for government, which can be used to hold the government to account, rather than a bargaining chip for post-election horse-trading.

In this vein, I have argued against proportional representation and in favour of maintaining the First Past the Post electoral system. I have specifically targeted these arguments to the Labour Party because it is the party most inclined to introduce proportional representation. For example, I wrote an article in The Guardian warning the Labour Party against adopting proportional representation.

 

3. Strengthening Parliamentary Sovereignty

Under the British constitution, anything that Parliament legislates is ipso facto constitutional. Known as parliamentary sovereignty, this core feature of the British constitution allows for the unlimited legal authority of Parliament to legislate on whatever and however it likes. This idea is also sometimes called ‘legislative freedom’ or ‘parliamentary omnicompetence’.

The theory of parliamentary omnicompetence is very old. In 1628, even before the Civil War, the jurist John Selden argued, ‘were it established by act of parliament, it would be lawful for so it might be made death to rise before 9 o’clock’. In his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone argued that Parliament ‘acknowledges no superior on Earth’. The nineteenth century legal scholar Leslie Stephen wrote that if Parliament ‘decided that all blue-eyed babies should be murdered the preservation of blue-eyed babies would be illegal’.

Parliamentary sovereignty affords enormous potential for a government to drive through transformative economic and social reform. Indeed, the National Health Service, for example, is a unique creation of the British constitution. To socialise the entire healthcare system in the UK, which involved the appropriation of private and local hospitals into public and national hands with little to no compensation, the Attlee government simply needed a majority in the House of Commons.

While many academics and policy campaigners have supported efforts to limit parliamentary sovereignty – through devolution, arms-length bodies, and membership in supranational institutions like the European Union and European Convention on Human Rights, I have been trying to influence the public debate by defending the more traditional untrammelled version of parliamentary sovereignty.

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