Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? The book looks at how companies are bought and sold.

1. Corporate control and political salience; 2. Patient capital and markets for corporate control; 3. The managerial origins of institutional divergence in France and Germany; 4. The Netherlands and the myth of the corporatist coalition; 5. Managers, bureaucrats, and institutional change in Japan; 6. The noisy politics of executive pay; 7. Business power and democratic politics.

Pepper D. Culpepper is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute. He was previously on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of Creating Cooperation and coeditor of Changing France and The German Skills Machine. His work has appeared in International Organization, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Revue Française de Science Politique, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, West European Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Public Policy, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, among others. Culpepper was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University and received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.