The two drivers ISS STOXX names for the increase do not have the same shelf life [3][4]. Proponents redirecting attention away from environmental and social topics is a choice, and choices reverse; the lower rate of exclusion for governance proposals is a feature of how the no-action process treats subject matter, not a mood [4]. A company whose playbook for the past three seasons was to keep resolutions off the ballot rather than win the vote is holding a tool that works less well against a proposal about who chairs the board, in a regulatory setting the SEC staff has since revised [5].
What passes is sorted by category more than by company. Board declassification averaged 82.7 percent support and elimination of supermajority vote requirements 56.4 percent, while seven cumulative voting proposals averaged 3 percent and none of them cleared 4 percent [13][14]. That is a spread of 79.7 points between the top and bottom topic [3], and the line runs between mechanisms with decades of precedent behind them and proposals that ask existing holders to redistribute voting power among themselves.
The dual-class numbers make the same point from the other direction. Seven proposals asked only that voting results be disclosed class by class, which ISS notes would require no high-vote holder to relinquish anything, and they averaged 17.3 percent, trailing the eight proposals that asked for the structure itself to go [15]. Institutions are voting the principle rather than the achievable increment, so an issuer cannot buy quiet by offering the smaller concession.
West Pharmaceutical Services is the season's most useful data point for a board. Support reached 46.4 percent, 3.6 points short of a majority [9][2], and ISS attributes the strength partly to Chairman and CEO Eric Green having already announced he would resign once a successor was appointed, so backing an independent chair policy was not a verdict on the person in the job [10]. Succession timing is therefore a variable in the vote count, and a board that separates the roles on its own schedule takes away the cleanest argument a proponent has.
A skeptic would say none of the 71 chair proposals won, so the count is theatre [6][9]. The answer is that the three most common governance topics alone put 157 proposals on ballots [1], each consuming a no-action request or a statement of opposition, and the procedural filings on meeting and consent rights did draw outright majorities where the chair proposals did not [12]. The board deck version, that E&S risk has receded, is accurate as far as it goes [16]; it describes the half of the ballot that is shrinking.
What the record does not settle is scale. The ISS STOXX post quantifies the governance increase but characterises the E&S decline only as sharp [17], and the 71 chair proposals cover the first half of 2026 [6]. Direction is established and magnitude is not, which is enough to move the engagement calendar toward the nominating and governance committee and not enough to say how far it should travel.
