Building Political Agreements: Pragmatic and Responsive Decision-Makers

Are politicians willing to betray their ideology, party, voters, and/or own principles to reach agreements with rivals? Focusing on the case of Spain, this article shows that there are two types of parliamentarians: those who are purely practical when making decisions (pragmatic) and those who consider their voters and electoral program in that process (responsive). We use latent class analyses to identify such profiles and conduct multinomial regression analyses to examine who are the most likely to be responsive or pragmatic parliamentarians. Our findings suggest that the former tend to have populist attitudes, support citizen involvement in decision-making, reject expert involvement in the political process, and show high levels of affective polarization. In the concluding section, we discuss how the profile of decision-makers exposes tensions in the functioning of democracy.