What's less well known is the existence of a new kind of power broker on Pennsylvania Avenue, backroom power players who confront these forces and who strive to vault over them and, indeed, sometimes even succeed in doing so in making Washington work.

NPR: Can Next President Deliver on Promises of 'Change'?

Their entrenched leaderships owe their continued power more to backroom deals and stamping on dissidents than to any persuasive philosophy.

ECONOMIST: Venezuela

Through these profiles in backroom power, we mean to show how a new network operates in Washington today, and by a new set of rules.

NPR: Can Next President Deliver on Promises of 'Change'?

Since the election of Mr Jackson, the city's first black mayor, in 1973, power in Atlanta has been largely a matter of backroom deals between black politicians and white businessmen.

ECONOMIST: The race to take over from Bill Campbell

Success or failure in the struggle for power will be decided not by the ballot box but by backroom deals between factions.

ECONOMIST: Democracy in China

Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and compromises exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which today's Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.

ECONOMIST: Lexington