A compromising mindset? How citizens evaluate the trade-offs in coalition politics

Abstract

Coalition building depends on citizens having a ‘compromising mindset’: they must accept that parties need to compromise in order to gain influence and that this entails deviating from the original policy positions. In this study, we show that European citizens understand that compromise is essential for democratic governance and that they, holding everything else constant, prefer political parties that express a willingness to compromise. This finding appears to be independent from specific forms of coalition politics and to be widespread across different levels of political interest, formal education and even ideological extremity. Our analysis compares observational data from the Austrian National Election Survey (AUTNES) 2020 and an original survey from Denmark in 2021. We also present results from a conjoint experiment fielded in Denmark, which evaluates the effect of willingness to compromise on vote choice. Our finding is good news for European democracies where coalition politics and thus compromise is a necessity for governance. Yet, for vote-seeking politics, the situation is complex as citizens might sometimes punish parties for compromising, but sometimes also punish them for not compromising.