Another look at unelected governmental elites - Interview with William Genieys

In two recent books*, William Genieys looked at health insurance reforms in France and in the USA and studied unelected governmental welfare elites that made those reforms possible. He thereby identified correlations between the career paths of those policymakers and the development of health policies. This also enabled him to refute a few preconcieved ideas, such as the “Government of strangers” and the prevalence of interest groups in such reforms in the USA, and the thesis of the dominance of neoliberal ideas on policies in the health insurance sector in France.

*Elites, Policies and State Reconfiguration. Transforming the French Welfare Regime. William Genieys, Mohammad-Saïd Darviche. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. A Government of Insiders. The People Who Made the Affordable Care Act Possible. William Genieys. John Hopkins University Press, 2024.

Interview and video by Véronique Etienne and Sébastien Wony, October 2023.
Download a transcription of the interview (PDF, 96 ko)