This book's main finding can be summarized in one sentence: the more the public cares about an issue, the less managerial organizations will be able to exercise disproportionate influence over the rules governing that issue. In other words, business power goes down as political salience goes up. So why spend an entire book developing an argument that could be communicated so succinctly? First, and most importantly, this fact has a significant impact on the lives of people around the world who live in democracies. The promise of popular sovereignty is only realized when politicians think voters care about issues and inform themselves about those issues. A second, related point also motivates this book: the explanatory power of this simple truth has been underestimated, even by many of those who study politics for a living.

Most of this book has dealt with a policy area of profound political importance for how capitalist systems operate: the rules governing corporate control. Some regimes of corporate control treat companies as mere commodities, free to be bought and sold at will by owners in search of the highest rate of return on their investment. Others, by contrast, view the company as a place where many important political and distributive compromises of capitalist democracy are struck. In these systems, rules restrain the buying and selling of companies on the assumption that a company is the site of many negotiated deals between management, labor, and other stakeholders, and that frequent and unpredictable changes of ownership challenge these firm-level bargains. These differences are fundamental to the distinction between different varieties of capitalism.