Balancing Between the Life Blood of Politics and an Object of Contempt: A Qualitative Study of Swedish MPs’ Perceptions of the Political Compromise

Compromising is at the heart of politics, yet the concept is insufficiently understood from an agent’s perspective. This is important because the type of compromising is related to different qualities of politics and governing. In this article, we study Swedish politicians’ perceptions of political compromise to identify the meaning constructs of different approaches to compromising. We analyse a set of interviews with 21 Swedish MPs from a theory-guided content perspective, which allows for an inductive approach to the distinctive meanings of the politicians’ interview answers, but also connects these to theoretically derived meanings of the political compromise. We find the politicians to view compromise pragmatically as a necessity or idealistically as normatively valuable for democracy. Sometimes, the approach also includes a moralist contempt for certain types of compromises. The moralist perception was found to sometimes align with the pragmatic or idealist perceptions, mainly as a rhetorical anti-thesis for legitimising one’s stance. The pragmatic and idealistic perceptions seemed mutually exclusive. The findings indicate that analysing the politicians’ approaches to compromise can be informative for understanding the resulting politics and governing, where the pragmatic perception can be indicative of a governing mindset and the idealistic perception of a campaign mindset.