The phrase "are actually governed" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the rules, laws, or principles that control or influence a particular situation or subject.
Example: "The behaviors of these organisms are actually governed by their genetic makeup and environmental factors."
Alternatives: "are truly regulated" or "are indeed controlled".
Brooks makes a good point that too much time is taken, paying attention to reality teevee show personalities like Gingrich and Palin (his Gingrich line, "he has a billion ideas and about six hundred of them are good" is pretty cutting), and not enough time paying attention to the Republicans who are actually governing, like Chris Christie and Mark Kirk.
What looks like anarchic activity in Lagos is actually governed by a set of informal but ironclad rules.
The size of the microspheres was actually governed by the coalescence of the microdroplets in the growth process.
In a word, the plastic deformation behavior of Cu-Ni alloys is actually governed by the competitive influence of SRC and SFE.
The Berkman Center's recently launched Publius Project is an effort to understand how the Internet is actually governed, and how we might want it to be.
Since Hideyori was only five years old when his father died in 1598, the country was actually governed by a council of five warriors whom Hideyoshi had appointed co-regents for his son in the event of his own death.
Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player.
German air transport is actually governed by two fundamentally different market regimes which belong to different geographical areas of the world: While intra-EU air transport as well as some other markets are fully liberalized, most air transport links with the rest of the world are still subject to regulation by restrictive air service agreements.
One of the important questions in the United States today — and, eventually, in all democracies where income inequality has risen sharply, which is to say in pretty much all democracies — is what impact the political ineffectiveness of the super-rich at the ballot box will have on how the country is actually governed.
