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Introduction: Meeting in the Middle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Richard Bellamy ,
Markus Kornprobst  and
Christine Reh
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Abstract

Compromise is routinely evoked in everyday language and in scholarly debates across the social sciences. Yet, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study. The introduction to this inter-disciplinary volume addresses the research gap in three steps. First, we offer three reasons for the study of compromise: its empirical omnipresence in politics, its theoretical potential to bridge the rationalist-constructivist divide, and its normative promise to recognize the plurality of society. Second, we introduce different approaches to the coherence, legitimacy and limits of compromise found in the existing explanatory and normative literatures. We discuss why these literatures need to speak to one another, and identify possible applications in empirical research. Third, we conceptualize compromise as one possible solution to a conflict. Distinct from both dissensus and consensus, all compromises share three characteristics: concessions, non-coercion and continued controversy. However, different types of compromise can be distinguished by how mutual, costly and painful concessions are; by whether all forms of coercion are absent; and by the degree to which the relevant parties’ grounds for conflict are transformed. We conclude by discussing the challenge and appeal of ‘politics as compromise’ in plural and complex societies.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Politics as Compromise , 2012 , pp. 275 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012.

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55 We paraphrase here Michael Sandel's famous plea for ‘the possibility that when politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone’ (M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 183). However, we follow Henry Richardson in regarding compromise as providing a less romanticized version of that possibility than Sandel's communitarian civic republicanism (H. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 153).