The United States is the only major industrialized country which does not use the metric system. The isolation provoked by this non-use has multiple consequences ranging from high conversion costs to major scientific calculation errors.
In 1971, following the metrication of the United Kingdom, the U.S. Metric Study was created to examine the possibility of a conversion. The different reports issued by the Study showed that a switch to the metric system would be possible within a ten year period. Thus, in 1975, the American Congress ratified the Metric Conversion Act (MCA), which aim was to ‘plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States’. The MCA also created the U.S. Metric Board (USMB) to coordinate the conversion. Despite this federal commitment, the conversion did not happen. The USMB was dissolved in 1982 and in 1987 the MCA was amended to diminish its effects. To this day, the U.S. are still using the imperial system.
Although, government action intended to push towards a conversion, the outcome was not met. What went wrong in the implementation process? Considering the hostility of the public opinion, was the conversion bound to fail ?
The first reason that might explain the failure is found in the text of the law itself.
The MCA did not set any ‘goals’ (Hood 1976). The text made the conversion voluntary and not mandatory. For a top down approach, a policy is successful when it has ‘clear and consistent objectives’ (Sabatier & Mazmanian 1980), the MCA did not have any, a ‘voluntary conversion’ is a vague statement.
As a consequence, the USMB, created to coordinate the conversion, did not have clear objectives either. Therefore the implementation lacked a ‘clear line of authority’ (Hood 1976). In 1981, the Board itself reported that it ‘lacked the clear congressional mandate to bring about national conversion’.
One might ask why the text used the term ‘voluntary’ instead of ‘mandatory’. The lack of public support for the conversion is an answer. As developed by Sabatier and Mazmanian, public support is a major factor in policy implementation. In this case public support was very low. People either saw the conversion as a ridicule and useless decision or either as a threat to American history. The National Cowboy Hall of Fame sued the government to stop the process of metrication, arguing that ‘the West was won by the inch, foot, yard, and mile’. It can be imagined that the text was the result of a consensus between supporters of the metric system and its opponents, the common ground being the term ‘voluntary’, as ‘mandatory’ would have stoped the law from being proclaimed.
In a much broader vision, this public hostility can be explained by the so called ‘American exceptionalism’ (Kingdon, 1999). In his book, America the unusual, J. Kingdon explains that there is a ‘low popular support for government action’ in the U.S., which explains their isolation from the rest of the world in some areas.
In conclusion, it appears that the specific vision of government action in the U.S. resulted in a relatively weak law that seemed to be bounded to failure. Following the MCA, in the 80’s and the 90’s, several laws tried to make the United States metric. Even if they proved to be more successful than the MCA, none of them completely achieved the challenge. Future legislation will have to draw tougher lines, but first and foremost, they will need to convince the public.
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