Politics & Society 39(1) 103–140 © 2011 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0032329210395000 http://pas.sagepub.com PAS395000 PAS 1 The Australian National University, Canberra ACT, Australia Corresponding Author: Simon Niemeyer, Centre for Deliberative Global Governance, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT, 0200, Australia Email: simon.niemeyer@anu.edu.au The Emancipatory Effect of Deliberation: Empirical Lessons from Mini-Publics Simon Niemeyer 1 Abstract This article investigates the prospects of deliberative democracy through the analysis of small-scale deliberative events, or mini-publics, using empirical methods to understand the process of preference transformation. Evidence from two case studies suggests that deliberation corrects preexisting distortions of public will caused by either active manipulation or passive overemphasis on symbolically potent issues. Deliberation corrected these distortions by reconnecting participants’ expressed preferences to their underlying “will” as well as shaping a shared understanding of the issue.The article concludes by using these insights to suggest ways that mini-public deliberation might be articulated to the broader public sphere so that the benefits might be scaled up. That mini-public deliberation does not so much change individual subjectivity as reconnect it to the expression of will suggests that scaling up the transformative effects should be possible so long as this involves communicating in the form of reasons rather than preferred outcome alone. Keywords deliberative democracy, public will, preference transformation, mini-publics, symbolic politics Much of the theory of deliberative democracy is concerned with macro-level processes of public sphere transformation, but most of the evidence available to us about delibera- tion comes from deliberative mini-publics. There are good reasons for this: achieving ideal deliberation is much simpler on a small scale. Innovative “deliberative” forums, such as deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, and consensus conferences in most cases