Don't Budge! The Reputational Cost of Political Compromises

How do citizens evaluate political parties’ willingness to compromise during coalition negotiations in representative democracies? While previous research has shown that citizens support the principle of political compromise, it remains unclear how parties’ compromise acceptance during coalition negotiations affects the voters’ trust. We argue that parties incur substantial reputational costs when they are willing to compromise during coalition negotiations. We use a pre-registered survey experiment in Germany fielded immediately after the 2021 parliamentary elections (\texttt{N=7,562}) to isolate the effect of parties’ decision to compromise or not from success or failure in the negotiations. Our findings reveal that voters place more trust in their parties when they remain steadfast during negotiations. Highly principled individuals and those with low social trust are particularly likely to reject compromising parties. Given the centrality of compromise in representative democracy, these findings suggest that political distrust may be a systemic component of representative democracy.