Can We Compromise in Public? The Paradoxical Place of Compromise in Democratic Decision Making

Compromise is often deemed incompatible with publicity. This paper analyses the compatibility (or lack thereof) of publicity and compromise. The relation between publicity and compromise matters because compromise is a central decision mode in contemporary democracies and because publicity has become an imperative for democratic governments and legislatures. If compromise does not hold up in public, the accountability of compromise makers becomes problematic. Therefore, the relation of compromise to democracy would be paradoxical because it would be both central to democracy and conflicting with accountability and publicity, which are fundamental democratic tenets. To disentangle the complex relationship between compromise and publicity, we first draw on existing studies and actors’ speeches to analyse the effects that publicity has on actors’ compromise behaviours. We identify three main effects and discuss the assumptions that underlie them. This analysis leads us to argue that we lack definitive evidence of an analytical incompatibility between compromise and publicity.