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AbstractDeliberation is widely believed to enhance democracy by helping to refine the 'public will', moving its participants' policy attitudes closer to their 'full-consideration' policy attitudes – those they would hypothetically hold with unlimited information, to which they gave unlimited reflection. Yet there have also been claims that the social dynamics involved generally 'homogenize' attitudes (decreasing their variance), 'polarize' them (moving their means toward the nearer extreme), or engender 'domination' (moving their overall means toward those of the attitudes held by the socially advantaged) – attitude changes that may often beawayfrom the participants' full-consideration attitudes and may thus distort rather than refine the public will. This article uses 2,601 group-issue pairs in twenty-one Deliberative Polls to examine these claims. Reassuringly, the results show no routine or strong homogenization, polarization, or domination. What little pattern there is suggests some faint homogenization, but also some faintmoderation(as opposed to polarization) andopposition(as opposed to domination) – all as is to be expected when the outside-world forces shaping pre-deliberation attitudes are slightly more centrifugal than centripetal. The authors lay out a theoretical basis for these expectations and interpretations and probe the study's results, highlighting, among other things, deliberation's role in undoing outside-world effects on pre-deliberation attitudes and the observed homogenization's, polarization's, and domination's dependence on deliberative design.

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation's effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then the airport; the other half the reverse. This split-half design helps distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the treatment. As expected, the highly salient airport issue saw only a slight effect, while much less salient revenue-sharing issue saw a much larger one.