In an era of increasingly public diplomacy, conventional wisdom assumes that leaders who compromise damage their reputations and lose the respect of their constituents, which undermines the prospects for international peace and cooperation. This article challenges this assumption and tests how leaders can negotiate compromises and avoid paying domestic approval and reputation costs. Drawing on theories of individuals’ core values, psychological processes, and partisanship, the author argues that leaders reduce or eliminate domestic public constraints by exercising proposal power and initiating compromises. Employing survey experiments to test how public approval and perceptions of reputation respond to leaders’ strategies across security and economic issues, the author finds attitudes toward compromise are conditioned by the ideology of the audience and leader, with audiences of liberals being more supportive of compromise. In the US case, this results in Republican presidents having greater leeway to negotiate compromises. The article’s contributions suggest that leaders who exercise proposal power have significant flexibility to negotiate compromise settlements in international bargaining.

中文翻译：

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妥协的力量

在公共外交日益增多的时代，传统观点认为，妥协的领导人会损害他们的声誉并失去选民的尊重，从而破坏国际和平与合作的前景。本文对这一假设提出了挑战，并测试了领导者如何协商妥协并避免支付国内认可和声誉成本。作者借鉴个人核心价值观、心理过程和党派关系的理论，认为领导人通过行使提案权和发起妥协来减少或消除国内公共约束。采用调查实验来测试公众对声誉的认可和认知如何响应领导者在安全和经济问题上的战略，作者发现对妥协的态度受听众和领导者意识形态的制约，自由派的听众更支持妥协。就美国而言，这导致共和党总统在谈判妥协方面拥有更大的回旋余地。文章的贡献表明，行使提案权的领导人在国际谈判中谈判妥协解决方案时具有很大的灵活性。