Ganesh Sitaraman

In 2013, he published The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars.[10] In The Counterinsurgent's Constitution, Sitaraman takes an interdisciplinary approach from fields including history, policy, and law to study the applicability of international law to counterinsurgency operations, with the intention of remaining readable for a general audience.[11] The focus of counterinsurgency on strengthening legal and economic institutions means that legal questions are some of the core challenges for counterinsurgency policy, yet The Counterinsurgent's Constitution was the first book to connect counterinsurgency policy to the laws of warfare.[12]

In 2017, Sitaraman published The Crisis of the Middle-class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic. Sitaraman seeks to explain significant stresses that the American legal system is undergoing, and attributes these stresses to the collapse of the American middle class.[13] Specifically, he studies the connection between the Constitution of the United States and economic inequality, arguing that the constitution is dependent on a substantial middle class to safeguard it, in contrast to constitutions that are created in conditions of economic inequality and encode rules to perpetuate that inequality.[14]

Sitaraman argues that when significant economic inequality threatens the efficacy of the constitution, structural change is required in order to recover political stability; a successful historical example of this process is the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which embedded reform in a fundamental legal modification, whereas the New Deal reformers were unsuccessful in the long run because the policy changes they pursued could eventually be reversed.[14] The thesis of The Crisis of the Middle-class Constitution, which connects economic inequality with the quality and stability of American governance, was covered in several media outlets including The Atlantic,[15] The Washington Post,[16] and The New York Times, where it was discussed by Angus Deaton.[17] The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution was named as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2017 by The New York Times,[18] and was a recipient of a 2018 PROSE Award for Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher.[19]

Sitaraman published two books in 2019. With Anne L. Alstott, he published The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality. He was also the author of the 2019 book The Great Democracy: How to Fix politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America. The Great Democracy describes a progressive platform for systemic change which is offered as an alternative to market-driven neoliberalism in the United States, including policy prescriptions for decreased barriers to citizen participation, expanded health care, legal reform, and climate policy.[20]

In The Great Democracy Sitaraman continues to connect changes in contemporary American politics with developments in the American economy, arguing that a rigged economy has created a rigged politics,[21] and that a change is needed in American politics on the order of historic movements like New Deal progressivism.[20] The release of the book was covered by a number of media outlets, many of which discussed how the thesis of the book mirrored a debate then ongoing in the 2020 Democratic primary race: Sitaraman was a longtime advisor to Elizabeth Warren, who was then advancing a vision for structural change in line with Sitaraman's thesis, whereas Pete Buttigieg, Warren's rival for the nomination and Sitaraman's college friend, was widely seen as advocating a non-structural and policy-based response to the same problems.[21][22] Sitaraman credited both as influences in the book.[23]