Recent scholarship claims that citizen deliberation can contribute to the quality of democracy and to the legitimacy of political decision making. By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the values a polity should promote. However, if deliberative democracy wants to contribute to the legitimacy of the political system, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative processes have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this article, we set out to refine the theory on deliberative legitimacy and to determine the legitimacy of one particularly interesting deliberative event, namely the Belgian G1000. We will argue that it is very difficult for deliberative processes to be high on all dimensions of legitimacy and that there is a tradeoff between input and output legitimacy. Moreover, we find that design characteristics to a large extent determine the legitimacy of deliberative processes.

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Deliberative democrats assume that political deliberation is capable of transforming citizens’ opinions and attitudes. This article takes this assumption as a starting point and tries to test it empirically by determining whether deliberation in an inter‐group setting induces more positive out‐group attitudes. Based on data from two deliberative experiments in Belgium, we argue that the overall effect of deliberative quality on attitude change is limited. The most important determinant of changes in out‐group attitudes is the group composition. Citizens who are confronted with the out‐group are more likely to hold more positive out‐group attitudes afterwards.

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In recent years, deliberative democracy has moved from a philosophical ideal into an empirical theory with numerous experiments testing the theoretical assumptions. Despite the wealth of evidence on the potential for deliberation, scholars have remained hesitant to test the theoretical premises under rather more adverse circumstances. This article, in contrast, tries to push deliberative scholarship to its edge by focusing on the viability of citizen deliberation in deeply divided societies. Our research questions are whether contact between citizens of competing segments undermines the potential for deliberation, and under which institutional conditions this is so. Based on a deliberative experiment in Belgium, in which we varied the group composition and the decision-making rule, we argue that decision rules are strong predictors of deliberative quality, but more importantly that the confrontation between citizens from both sides of the divide does not undermine the quality of deliberation. On the contrary even, our results indicate that the quality of intergroup deliberation is higher than that of intragroup deliberation, no matter what the rule.

Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.