In an evolving deliberative system, a crucial question is how deliberation of ordinary citizens differs from that of professional politicians. This study compares the deliberative capacity of citizens and political elites on exactly the same issue, namely a direct democratic initiative in Switzerland on the expulsion of criminal immigrants. In concrete, I perform a quantitative content analysis of the quality of citizen deliberation in an online poll and compare this to the quality of deliberation in representative politics, namely in the non-public committee and public floor debates in the Swiss parliament. The findings show that political elites reach much higher levels of justification rationality than ordinary citizens, but achieve lower levels in terms of respect. I conclude that citizen deliberation, while useful as an advisory tool, cannot replace serious deliberative scrutiny in representative politics.The last decade has seen a proliferation of democratic innovations that promote citizen deliberation, such as deliberative polls, citizens' juries or consensus conferences. 1 Several proposals have been made to promote direct citizen deliberation via referenda or initiatives (see Smith 2009) as well as proposals preferring a more participatory form of government that gives ordinary people a say (e.g., Fung and Wright 2003). Indeed, many deliberative theorists promote such forms of popular participation, but at the same time do not deny the importance of representative democracy (e.g., Dryzek 2000;Gutmann and Thompson 2004). Despite the impressive number of successful deliberative events with citizens, it is far from clear how easily the deliberative task can be handed over to citizens. Specifically, in the face of issue complexity, one may wonder whether citizens with highly varying deliberative capacities are really capable of better deliberation than professional politicians. This raises the question of how the deliberative capacities of ordinary citizens and professional politicians differ.Despite a growing interest in deliberative capacity in the last decade, we still lack systematic empirical investigations of deliberative capacity in the real world. Specifically, the capacities of citizens and elites have been only very rarely analyzed in a comparative way (for exceptions see Hendriks et al. 2007;Landwehr and Holzinger 2010). While there are plenty of opportunities to study plenary parliamentary debates, there are fewer opportunities to study the deliberation of ordinary citizens, especially when undertaking a

We present a model of deliberative inclusion, focusing on reciprocity in the interaction between structural minorities/disadvantaged groups and majorities/privileged groups. Our model, however, comes with a 'friendly amendment': we have put the 'burden of reciprocity' mainly on majorities and privileged groups. It is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Empirically, we apply our model to the interaction of linguistic groups in the Swiss parliament. We find a highly egalitarian, sometimes even minority-favoring mode of interaction between the German-speaking majority and linguistic minorities. The German-speaking majority seems to be willing to take the 'burden of reciprocity' when linguistic minorities' vital interests are concerned. Conversely, linguistic minorities are slightly more self-referential and adversarial under such conditions. We present a model of deliberative inclusion, focusing on reciprocity in the interaction between structural minorities/disadvantaged groups and majorities/privileged groups. Our model, however, comes with a 'friendly amendment': we have put the 'burden of reciprocity' mainly on majorities and privileged groups. It is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Empirically, we apply our model to the interaction of linguistic groups in the Swiss parliament. We find a highly egalitarian, sometimes even minority-favoring mode of interaction between the German-speaking majority and linguistic minorities. The German-speaking majority seems to be willing to take the 'burden of reciprocity' when linguistic minorities' vital interests are concerned. Conversely, linguistic minorities are slightly more self-referential and adversarial under such conditions.

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