ABSTRACT
The G1000 offered an excellent setting to assess the potential for deliberation in a multilingual and divided society, and to test the validity of the theoretical approaches. The talk-centric approach to politics puts communicative interactions centre stage and therefore implicitly assumes that the participants in deliberation are able to talk to and understand each other. In other words, meaningful deliberation assumes that participants share a common language or some sort of shared vernacular. The traditional conflict-management theories were sceptical about the potential for intergroup deliberation. Intergroup deliberation can foster the reduction of intergroup conflicts and bias. A significant contribution to the dynamics of social learning through deliberation was made by the research on Deliberative Polls. Through measuring citizens' opinions and attitudes in pre-test and post-test questionnaires, Deliberative Polls consistently show that citizens hold different opinions after having the opportunity to talk to each other.
