Talk of democratic reform sometimes focuses on talk. The aspiration of 'deliberative democracy' is for the mass public to influence policy making through public discussion. The common presumption is that this is an advanced version of democracy, possible only in established democracies. Even there, there are doubts. Some contend that ordinary citizens cannot deal with complex policy issues, 1 others that their deliberations will be distorted by gender or class inequalities, 2 and yet others that they will be ineluctably polarizing. 3 In less fully democratic societies like China's, the prospects may seem slimmer. Yet China has now been home to four Deliberative Polls. Here, we report on the first, in Zeguo Township in Wenling City. This was a local public consultation that attempted to affect policy choices, while fulfilling some ambitious criteria from democratic theory. We consider how well it succeeded.

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This paper is positioned at the intersection of two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. It analyzes results from a national field experiment in which more than 500 registered voters were brought together from around the country to deliberate in depth over a long weekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre–post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, depolarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in affective polarization. The paper develops the rationale for hypotheses explaining these decreases and contrasts them with a literature that would have expected the opposite. The paper briefly concludes with a discussion of how elements of this “antidote” can be scaled.

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Is there—or could there be—a Europe-wide public sphere? Some argue that one already exists, others that none is attainable. This debate turns on what it means to have one—on how much (and what kinds of) cross-border ‘discussion’ and public input it must entail. An ambitious European public sphere would involve more truly Europe-wide collective will formation and political accountability. This article attempts to move beyond speculation, with a discussion on an ambitious version of a European public sphere. Participants' opinions and vote intentions in Europolis were gauged before and after deliberating. This enables us to probe a double counterfactual: what if there was a more ambitious European public sphere, and what if European Parliamentary elections were consequently more deliberative.