Gentlemanly Conversation or Vigorous Contestation? An Exploratory Analysis of Communication Modes in a Transnational Deliberative Poll (Europolis)

In recent years, several scholars (Manin 2005; Bächtiger 2011) have advocated that deliberationists should take a more dedicated focus on contestation and confrontation in deliberative processes. This opening towards agonistic practices is strongly intertwined with epistemic notions of deliberative quality: there is relatively broad agreement in the psychological literature that vigorous contestation is essential for unravelling inconsistencies and flaws in participants’ arguments. In this article, we make a first attempt to systematically explore the amount of contestatory and consensual modes of communication in citizen deliberation. We do this in the context of Europolis, a pan-European deliberative poll. Despite strong opinion diversity, the four Europolis small group discussions that we analysed represent instances of ‘gentlemanly conversation’, with a bit of contestation surely, but mainly consisting of communication forms other than controversial argumentation (such as the pooling of information or the sharing of experiences).