The chapter begins by reviewing the long history of how Congress has procedural rules for itself and, in the process, created protections against majority tyranny while limiting the power of transient majorities to rewrite Americas laws. It also describes how members individual political need to depart from party platforms limits party leaders power and often promotes bipartisanship. The trouble is that these same rules facilitate gridlock, stoking anger and polarization across the wider society. The chapter concludes by analyzing how filibusters, supermajorities, and government shutdowns limit majority tyranny by supplying a practical test of when proposed legislation unduly burdens the minority.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.

Held’s contribution is a precise summary of the crisis of democracy that he and his co-authors have described at length in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (2013) and Beyond Gridlock (2017). His argument is that the global system of representative democratic states is now locked into a vicious cycle (“gridlock”). While it was initially a virtuous system after World War II, it produced a set of processes that transformed democratic globalization into a vicious system. He gives four reasons for this. The system now undermines democratic cooperation and freezes problem-solving capacity. He describes this gridlocked system in terms of four self-reinforcing stages of non-cooperation. This is a “crisis of democracy, as the politics of compromise and accommodation gives way to populism and authoritarianism.” In the conclusion, he cautions that we are heading down a path that is similar in several respects to the 1930s. He does not discuss ways forward in this brief paper, but he does so in Beyond Gridlock.

Chapter 7 discusses how to balance representation and accountability with processes that might better insulate legislators from their electoral fear as they seek to negotiate compromises. Ensuring that the public is knowledgeable about elected officials’ decisions is an important facet of democratic accountability. Yet the watchful eye of primary voters may also deter legislators from considering reasonable compromises. Chapter 7 discusses how to balance these two considerations and discusses whether communication with constituents can facilitate compromise. Our findings, as well as the comments from state legislators at the 2017 NCSL Summit, emphasize the importance of communication between legislators and their constituents – explaining the legislative process, justifying choices, and developing a home style that cultivates trust. With greater communication and building of trust, legislators may have leeway to insulate portions of the legislative process from public scrutiny, helping them reach compromises and overcome gridlock to solve pressing problems.

This chapter illustrates how legislators sometimes reject compromise proposals with an example of legislation on public lands management in Utah. Despite broad support for the bill, which was viewed as a compromise solution to increase protection for the San Rafael Swell area, it had detractors who felt it did not go far enough. The failure of the San Rafael Swell National Conservation Area legislation shows that legislators sometimes reject half-loaf compromises in pursuit of getting everything they want. This book takes a problem-oriented approach by examining why legislators reject half-loaf compromises and what can be done about it. This chapter summarizes the varied methods we used to understand the rejection of compromise, our findings that legislators fear punishment for compromise from subsets of the primary election who oppose particular compromises, and our contributions to solving this problem