The most widely read and influential component of the IPCC’s practice of writing is the summary for policymakers (SPM), where the key messages of the underlying report are presented in short sentences and figures to facilitate travel into the media, ministers’ speeches and UNFCCC negotiations. The aim of this chapter is to describe the politics of approval. The chapter begins the historical emergence of this practice and documents the tactics and strategies available to co-chairs, authors and delegates to influence the final outcome. Documenting participation in the authorship and approval of the SPM again illuminates the asymmetries revealed in previous chapters, but also highlights the growing presence of some developing countries in the process. This is evident in the content that has initiated some of the greatest struggle – the categorisation of developing versus developed countries. This account reveals that the forces structuring the final stage of the IPCC’s practice of writing originate in the broader global struggle to determine the meaning of climate change and continue after the approval, only now with a new SPM to substantiate national positions in the negotiation of the collective response.

The low status of domestic service in the Soviet hierarchy of labor undermined efforts to politicize domestic workers through union mobilization. The appeal of “productive” work inspired domestics to use their activism as springboard for careers outside of domestic service rather than for organizing their peers. Domestics’ reluctance to engage with the union only confirmed the long-standing suspicion that domestic service fostered “lackey’s souls” rather than conscious proletarian selves. This chapter provides insight into the problem of marginalized workers that have largely been excluded from organized labor. While the difficulty in organizing domestic workers is often negatively affected by their vulnerability and dependency on employers, the low status of housework in the gendered hierarchy of labor poses a different challenge as it conditions household workers to invest in changing careers rather than strengthening their labor organization.

Presidential primaries have a simple purpose: they are the elections to select a party’s presidential candidate for the general election. But they are often much more than that. In some states, they also serve as the first step in a series of steps that political parties use to handle other assorted types of business.

When voters go to the polls during a primary election, they are not voting for a presidential candidate. Instead, they may be helping to choose representatives to attend the party’s national nominating convention, a meeting where the actual presidential candidate is chosen. Or they may be choosing representatives to attend local conventions, like a county convention or a state convention, who will in turn go on to choose the representatives to attend the national convention. Or voters may be choosing representatives who will later meet to help choose presidential electors, the individuals who formally elect the next president and vice president.

The Democratic and Republican parties select their presidential nominees through a complex, fundamentally unstable process. It is an awkward amalgamation of disparate components, each designed to empower different constituencies within the party and pursue different goals. Each party ultimately chooses its nominee at a national convention comprised of delegates from each state. The mechanisms for selecting delegates to the national convention, however, are distinct from the procedures for determining the presidential candidates for whom those delegates must vote. National convention delegates are often selected at statewide or congressional-district conventions or through other intraparty mechanisms. They are typically pledged or “bound” to presidential candidates based on the outcomes of presidential preference contests, such as primaries and caucuses. Because of the complicated relationship among these components, the national convention need not nominate the person who received the most primary and caucus votes nationwide, won the most delegates, or prevailed in the most primaries and caucuses.

Why do we have an Election Day but not a Primary Day? No aspect of the presidential nomination process causes as much controversy as the primary calendar. The calendar starts off in January or February and ends in June of each election year. A total of 57 states and territories hold their primaries and caucuses over the course of these months. The Iowa caucuses always start off the calendar, followed by the New Hampshire primaries. The results of these contests invariably eliminate some candidates and bestow momentum on others. Many more candidates participate in the first few presidential nomination contests than in the many later ones. As a result, disproportionate power is given to voters whose states hold early nomination contests, while the citizens of states with later nomination contests have less or sometimes no voice in choosing their party’s presidential nominee. In most years, a party’s presidential nomination contest ends months before citizens in the late-voting states have ever had a chance to cast their ballots. To gain more influence and a greater voice, a number of ambitious states have tried to move their primaries and caucuses forward, creating a phenomenon that has come to be known as “front-loading.”

In 1976, the Iowa caucuses launched a Georgia governor and peanut farmer into the White House. In 2008, Barack Obama ran up delegate scores across the country during the Democratic nomination contest in caucus states characterized by high-intensity voting. The presidential caucuses have long been a staple of American democracy. In 2020, however, only three states—Iowa, Nevada, and Wyoming—hosted a presidential caucus. Overnight, the caucuses suddenly became obsolete. This chapter explains how and why this happened.

The major parties have repeatedly tinkered with the presidential nomination process over the past two hundred years. Since the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when rioting over an exclusionary nomination process led to a series of important reforms (primarily to the detriment of caucuses), the major parties have sought to balance ways to include ordinary individual voters in the nomination process while not necessarily excluding the party establishment.