This project will allow my collaborators and me to build on our on-going research showing that elected officials reject compromise proposals for reasons that go beyond simple ideological disagreement – that officials reject proposals that represent common ground and even when they stand to benefit from the proposal. The proposed research will evaluate voter-based communication solutions and elite-based negotiation process solutions using experiments on representative national samples and sitting state legislators. This work will result in a book that highlights some of the impediments to negotiation in politics, and the effectiveness of potential solutions.