Compromise-Building in the Spotlight of the Media? Individual and Situational Influences on the Self-Mediatization of Parliamentary Negotiations

Abstract

Political actors in negotiations often face the challenge of contradictory logics of discreet compromise-building on the one hand and generating media publicity to enhance transparency and gain public support on the other. This paper examines how members of parliament (MPs) handle this dilemma within intra-coalition parliamentary negotiations that are essential for legislative decision-making. By referring to the mediatization approach, the concept of self-mediatization of political negotiation systems is introduced to theoretically capture politicians’ self-initiated media publications regarding negotiations and associated changes in their negotiation behavior. It is hypothesized that the self-mediatization of negotiations is influenced by negotiators’ general tendency to seek media attention as well as situational pressures and incentives. The hypotheses were tested with a factorial survey among German state-level MPs (n = 258) using experimental vignettes. Results show that both individual and situational factors affect parliamentarians’ tendency to publicly communicate about negotiations and consequently negotiate in a more news-media-logic-compatible, that is, more conflictual, manner. However, since the surveyed MPs on average show a high willingness to agree with their coalition partner on the explicit secrecy of negotiations, independent of the influencing parameters examined, self-mediatization does not seem to be an existential threat to the intra-coalition compromise-building capacity of parliamentary negotiation systems.