horse-trading 
noun [mass noun]
1The buying and selling of horses.Appleby is famous around the world for its annual New Horse Fair, where gypsies and travellers from across the country and Europe gather for a week of horse-trading and celebrations.
1.1Hard and shrewd bargaining, especially in politics: we will win with no horse-trading or electoral pacts...
- After much haggling and horse-trading, a compromise is hammered out that satisfies few but allows each minister to claim that it could have been much worse.
- The argument used to be that additional budgets diminished the credibility of the main budget and the planning system in general since ministers could always indulge in further horse-trading throughout the year.
- But I suspect it's largely beside the point because once you're to that point you're into a process of legislative horse-trading and conference committees.
Derivatives
horse-trade
- Against this backdrop of dispersed, specific responsibilities, the French state horse-trades constantly with the private sector, happy to get private funding for the infrastructure or services it wants.
- Let's move to something he can horse-trade about, and that is immigration policy.
- They have horse-traded, and have come back and said: ‘No, 20 percent isn't enough, and we're not going to be silent.’
horse-trader
/ noun ...- The current compromise there would have been impossible without experienced political horse-traders like Michael Somare and John Momis.
- There were few birth or marriage certificates, and when there were, the names were so strange: Lementeni Smith, his father a horse-trader, which should have set the bells ringing, but it didn't.
- Early on in Everything Holy, the poem ‘The Constitution of Stars’ begins ‘the moon has moved’ and goes on to track horse-traders back to the mythic age of elephants.