see also: Simon Niemeyer, “Deliberation and the Public Sphere: Macro lessons from Minipublics.” also presents a useful step on the way to scaling up deliberation into the public sphere more broadly.

The Fremantle Traffic Bridge is one of two important road traffic links across the Swan River linking the port city of Fremantle to Perth metropolitan area. Its present condition has deteriorated to the stage that either upgrading or replacement is required. Original construction of the bridge was in 1939, followed by an upgrade in 1974 with an expected lifespan of around 30 years, which is now coming to an end.

In order to decide the future of the bridge, the Western Australian state government, through the department of Main Roads, embarked on a decision process that involved a large scale Community Engagement Process. The overall objective was to identify public views on and preferences for the six options developed by the Main Roads to help form Main Road’s advice to Government on the proposed future of Fremantle Bridge.

This paper will present empirical evidence from the analysis of deliberative mini-publics. Evidence from two case studies suggests that the main effect of deliberation is to correct a pre-existing distortion of public will. In contrast to pre-deliberative non-attitudes, these distortions are a product of either active manipulation of expressed preferences by the employment of political strategies such as symbolic politics or a product of a generally corrupted public sphere.

Experiments in deliberative mini-publics have acted as a corrective lens to these distortions by reconnecting the expressed preferences of participants to their underlying 'will' ?? operationalized under the rubric of subjectivity. Before deliberation, preferences reflect only a small part of the subjective landscape that is activated by the predominant political discourses. Following deliberation preferences reflect a much wider spectrum of beliefs and desires held by individuals.

Greater intersubjectivity can also be demonstrated by the use of measures of interpersonal consistency between subjectivity and preferences. That mini-public deliberation does not fundamentally change individual subjectivity — merely reconnecting it the expression of will — Deliberation and the Public Sphere Simon Niemeyer suggests that it may be at least possible to achieve the same results more broadly in the public sphere. The paper concludes by tentatively suggesting ways in which the benefits of deliberation might be institutionalized in light of these findings.