Publication

Journal	British Journal of Political Science
Title of proceedings	British Journal of Political Science
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000144

This article investigates the deliberative abilities of ordinary citizens in the context of ‘Europolis’, a transnational deliberative poll. Drawing from upon a philosophically grounded measureinstrument, an updated version of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI), it explores to what extent how capable European citizens are capable of meeting deliberative ideals; whether socio-economic, cultural and psychological biases affect the ability to deliberate; and whether opinion change is argument-based. On the positive side, Europolis shows that the ideal deliberator scoring high on all deliberative standards does actually exists, and that participants change their opinions more often when rational justification rationality is used in the discussions was higher. On the negative side, deliberative abilities are unequally distributed: in particular,ly working working-class members are less likely to reach contribute to high-quality deliberation.