This chapter describes the journey that the scientific assessment travels from author nomination through to the drafting and reviewing of the emerging report, and explores the social scientific order that structures and imprints on the IPCC’s writing of climate change through the process. It is in the initial stages of the scientific assessment, in the government nomination and author selection processes, that asymmetries in global knowledge of climate change and their effects become apparent. While developed countries have institutionalised processes for identifying and nominating experts, the majority of developing countries do not submit any author nominations. Once compiled, it is scientific conventions and measures of authority that are used to select and appoint the expertise necessary to fulfil the government approved outline of the report. However, when these activities are situated in broader patterns and practices of knowledge production, it becomes apparent that these reproduce the structures and exclusions of the existing global knowledge economy. These asymmetries are also apparent in the order of relations in the author teams and the submission of government review comments, which reduces the space for more diverse understandings and knowledges of climate change that are relevant to and reflect the interests and needs of all IPCC member governments. The IPCC has attempted to address these asymmetries through selection criteria and other mechanisms to shape the social order of authorship, which to date have proven more successful in broadening gender representation than ensuring the full participation of developing country authors in the assessment.

The institutional framework and legal rules through which democracies choose the nominees who compete to become a nation’s Chief Executive (the President or Prime Minister) are among the most important features in the institutional design of any democracy. Yet despite the considerable academic attention over the last thirty years to many other institutional and legal aspects of American democracy—redistricting, the regulation of money in politics, voting rights, election administration—surprisingly little scholarly focus has thus been devoted to the way we have come to structure the presidential nomination process. This scholarly gap is particularly striking because one of the most consequential and radical changes in the last fifty years to the way American democracy is structured is the change we made to the way the major party nominees for President are selected: the shift to a purely populist method in which primary elections (and a small dose of caucuses) completely determine the party’s nominees.

It has been nearly two centuries since an American presidential election has evoked a crisis of confidence like that following the election of 2016. Not since the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 has there been such a public display of anxiety concerning the methods by which we choose our chief executive. As in the contest of 1828 pitting the Democrat Jackson against his Federalist opponent John Quincy Adams, the presidential nominating process of 2016 produced a contest between a celebrity populist, widely seen as unqualified by experience or temperament, and a highly experienced and competent but deeply uninspiring political insider who had been anointed by establishment elites.

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.

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.

National convention delegates are chosen through a bewildering array of procedures that vary from state to state. Because states, for the most part, determine not only whether parties hold a primary or caucus, but also which voters are eligible to participate, delegates arrive at the national convention having been selected by very different constituencies that have very different policy ideas and very different levels of commitment to their respective parties.

The result is that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is able to express a clear ideological message through its presidential nominations. Presidential candidates seeking to win delegates in different state elections must appeal to the electorate in each state—and the state electorates differ greatly because the state-imposed voter eligibility rules differ greatly from state to state. As a result, candidates who articulate a clear and consistent message will draw different levels of support from the primary electorate in the various states, even when their messages appeal to similar proportions of party members and non-party members in each state.