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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
Twitter: @richardmarcj
Office Hours: Mondays 16:00-17:00 and Tuesdays 10:00-11:00 (in person only)

Profile

Richard Johnson joined Queen Mary in 2020. Previously, he was a lecturer at Lancaster University. He has held visiting research and teaching positions at Yale University, Cambridge University, and Beijing Foreign Studies University. He studied at Cambridge (Jesus College) and Oxford (Nuffield College), where he taught tutorials on US and comparative politics.

Richard Johnson’s 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).

Additionally, he has published academic articles about policy and the policymaking process in the US, including the reception of private school vouchers in urban communities, school district secession and its impact on school re-segregation (with Desmond King), 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), and the judicial politics of abortion. He is also the author of a textbook, US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol University Press, 2021).

Another area of interest 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). He has published academic research on British women’s opposition to the Common Market, Labour’s changing policy on Europe under Neil Kinnock, the history of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, Theresa May’s record on LGBT rights, and Jeremy Corbyn’s foreign policy outlook (with Mark Garnett). He 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 (with Yuan Yi Zhu) the co-editor of the book Sceptical Perspectives on the Changing Constitution of the United Kingdom (Hart, 2023) and contributed a chapter on the ‘Case for the Political Constitution’. He has also published academic research (with Ron Johnston and Iain McLean) on proportional representation.

Current projects include a study of ethnic minority voting patterns and the Republican party; ‘political sectarianism’ and US partisanship; a comparative analysis of ‘busing’ in the US, UK, and France; a comparative history of British and American abortion politics; and several outputs related to the history of Labour Euroscepticism.

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