1 Which conception of political equality do deliberative mini-publics promote? Dominique Leydet Département de philosophie Université du Québec à Montréal leydet.dominique@uqam.ca N.B. This paper’s final version appears in the European Journal of Political Theory, DOI: 10.1177/1474885116665600 Political equality is at the heart of democratic citizenship. Contemporary democracies affirm the equal rights of citizens to vote, join political parties and stand for elections. The conception of political equality that informs these rights is standardly described as an equality of opportunity for influence (Swift 2006: 189; Knight and Johnson 1997: 280; Christiano 2004: 275; Cohen and Fung 2004: 171). Though citizens may choose not to participate in the political life of their society, political rights formally secure their equal opportunity to participate in processes of opinion and will formation. This conception of political equality includes agency as one of its key elements: equal rights enable citizens to perform political activities individually as well as collectively. Indeed, the capacity to act with others is a central component of democratic politics. Yet contemporary democracies are also societies in which vast inequalities in resources and status exist between citizens and these inequalities significantly affect opportunities for political influence. Empirical enquiries consistently show that background inequalities in socioeconomic resources and education, as well as inequality associated with gender and ethnicity, translate into unequal ‘presence’ and ‘voice’ within the institutions and practices of contemporary democracies. 1 Citizens who are economically and socially disadvantaged find themselves in a situation of ‘political poverty’ − defined by James Bohman (1997: 333) as the ‘inability of groups of citizens to participate effectively in the democratic process’, which is related to a deficit in the ‘capability for effective social agency’ (1997: 343). Political poverty means public exclusion, since politically poor citizens are incapable of successfully initiating the joint activity of public deliberation. It also means a form of coercive political inclusion since the politically marginalized are the legal addressees of decisions over which they have next to no control or influence.