There is a narrative among close followers of politics that compromise is undesirable: Americans would rather see legislators take principled stances and fight for them tooth and nail. If this is true, then the polarization and gridlock that plague Congress are simply unfortunate byproducts of mass preferences. In what is probably the most thorough examination of this topic, Jennifer Wolak’s Compromise in the Age of Party Polarization challenges some of the conventional wisdom about compromise and finds that it is more popular with the mass public than most think.

The issue of “compromise” sits at the intersection of public opinion, political identity, congressional behavior, and public voting behavior. This means that any book looking to tackle this topic must pull from a variety of literatures. Compromise in an Age of Party Polarization does just that and progresses in a way that is intuitive and easy to follow. After explaining common perceptions about public attitudes toward compromise, Wolak presents her main theoretical contribution, which permeates much of the book: compromise is a distinct form of problem solving. It assumes deep differences and implies bilateral losses, which have negative connotations. However, it is also an exercise in reciprocity, mutual respect, and democratic norms, which have positive connotations. Therefore, it is a process that Americans value even if it is not their ideal outcome, and Americans do care about both outcomes and the processes by which they are achieved. Importantly, the normative values embedded in the compromise process are socialized in ways that are independent of politics. After all, we have to compromise in our everyday life, both as children and as adults.

Wolak then presents a series of observational studies testing the theory that socialization is foundational to attitudes on compromise. This is done by examining individual-level factors that contribute to socialization, such as one’s level of education and civic engagement, as well as contextual factors such as living in areas with higher levels of social capital. These hypotheses bear out nicely. In addition to serving as a foundation for the tests that follow, this theory is an important contribution to social science more generally. It speaks to our knowledge about the effects of American education and civic participation.

Many of the remaining tests—both observational and experimental—focus on pitting partisan and political preferences against the socialized norm for compromise in a variety of contexts: support for politicians who favor compromise generally and on specific issues, support for compromise from one’s own party versus the opposition party, support for compromise when rules are broken/adhered to and when policy battles are close/lopsided, support for compromise among the affectively polarized, and so on. While walking through these situations, Wolak is careful to attend to the common concern that Americans like compromise in theory but not in practice. Many of these tests begin with the abstract principle of compromise and become more specific and stringent as they go. The acknowledgment of this concern, along with the thoroughness of these tests, is one of the book’s strengths.

Overall, these studies find a good deal of evidence that Americans do like compromise; it is not easily steamrolled by political preferences. During an era where the prevailing theory of partisanship is that of a potent social identity—possibly related to the recent increase in interparty hostility—it is easy to forget that other forces can guide our attitudes. Wolak’s findings add to the smaller, albeit necessary, scholarship about the limits of partisanship, ideology, and affective polarization.

The one finding that could merit more attention is the relationship between party ID (as opposed to partisan strength) and taste for compromise. Early in the book (pp. 43–44) when testing a variety of predictors for support for compromise in principle, party ID produces a null result. Wolak recognizes this is contrary to previous findings from Michael Wolf, J. Cherie Strachan, and Daniel Shea (“Forget the Good of the Game: Political Incivility and Lack of Compromise as a Second Layer of Party Polarization,” American Behavioral Scientist 56, 2012) that suggest that Democrats support the principle more than Republicans. Because their result is a consequential claim that has been amplified by news media, I anticipated that Wolak would thoroughly investigate and wrestle with this relationship. However, in later chapters that test the scenarios mentioned earlier, party ID seems to be left out or left hanging. It is not often tested, although in one case when it is, an asymmetry shows up: even though majorities of both groups prefer their party’s nominee to be someone who compromises, Democratic primary voters do so to a larger degree than Republican primary voters (pp. 91–92) Because the conflict between democratic norms and general political preferences/involvement is the main undercurrent of the book, it does make sense that strength of partisanship dominates the empirics rather than directional party ID. Still, I felt this was an important relationship that warranted more investigation and resolution either in the front end of the book or throughout. There is an opening here for additional work that digs into theories of party differences and comes to more definitive conclusions about whether asymmetries should arise at all and under what conditions.

Finally, it will be tempting for anyone reading this book near the time of publication to question how well these findings can hold given the nature of the 2020 election and the unavoidable reality that the Republican Party is playing “constitutional hardball” (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “Why Republicans Play Dirty,” New York Times, 2019) and facilitating a crisis of legitimacy (Seth Masket, “It’s Dangerous When the Minority Party Rules Everyone Else,” Washington Post, 2020), among other criticisms. In the conclusion, Wolak acknowledges other authors’ concerns about the erosion of norms and suggests that the findings are still reassuring because they seem to persist over time. However, it is also true that most (though not all) of the datasets in the book come from the years before Trump’s rise, and the political environment has become substantially worse even since the most recent dataset collected in 2019. The 2020 election is not the standard “democratic ritual” (p. 106) that reinforces government legitimacy that Wolak speaks of in her chapter on campaigns from years past. Of course, nobody can anticipate future events while undertaking a long project such as this. Thus, we should consider this work an important documentation of mass attitudes leading up to a democratic crossroads in American politics. Follow-up research in the coming years will be crucial for understanding whether principled attitudes toward compromise remain complex and can still compete with political preferences and antipathy toward out-parties after a volatile 2020 election cycle.

Overall, Compromise in an Age of Party Polarization is an achievement on a linchpin topic that has been heretofore underdeveloped despite its obvious importance. Wolak’s argument is clear, and the analyses are straightforward and easy to follow for anyone familiar with the quantitative process. This is clean and readable social science.