ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the different deliberative dimensions of the two public sphere types side by side, to assess whether challenger-initiated discourses do indeed display a higher discursive quality than those that originate in the political centre. For all of the different deliberative dimensions analysed below, we generally assume that the distribution of the actors in terms of the speakers on the one hand, and with regard to the speaker-addressee relationships on the other, are more balanced in those public spheres that are initiated by civil society than in those originating in the political centre (Hypothesis 1 (H1)). In other words, those debates corresponding more to the ideal type should display a more egalitarian participation structure. The second hypothesis focuses more specifically on the discursive interaction of the participants in the debates and expects that they generate more even patterns in challenger public spheres than in centre-driven ones. In the former, these patterns should be marked by an active core that displays a greater diversity of actor groups than in the latter and their interaction should also be more intense (Hypothesis 2 (H2)).
