Citizen’s panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, policy Delphi-method, deliberative inquiry, 21st Century Town Meetings, open forum as a form of deep democracy, participatory budgeting and deliberative city planning,… can all be labelled as deliberative methods, designed and used to approach wicked problems, to facilitate decision making, and to include everyone in this process. There are some common features of these so-called deliberative methods: (1) participants are provided with balanced factual information about the issue being considered; (2) there is ample opportunity for free and open discussion between citizens and researchers or policy actors or both; (3) participants are encouraged to discuss and challenge the information and consider each other’s views before (4) making a final decision or recommendation for action (Abelson et al., 2003; Degeling, Carter, & Rychetnik, 2015). Deliberative methods are not only deployed by deliberative democrats and curriculum experts; the less closely a deliberative exercise is tied to a policymaking process, the more it begins to look like research (Burchardt, 2014). Despite practitioner experience with and empirical investigation on deliberative methods the research literature lacks investigations of the rationales and underlying assumptions of deliberative methods. Especially when you look at deliberative methods from the lens of legitimacy theory (e.g. Cohen, 2003) or assessment frameworks based on this theory (e.g. Bekkers & Edwards, 2007; Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2015) inclusiveness of all stakeholders in a decision making process is at stake: by including everyone affected in the process leading to a decision, deliberations could prove capable of generating political outcomes that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2015). Moreover, deliberative methods do not only wish to address stakeholders’ issues -at times excluded from the policy table. In order to obtain legitimate answers, the process also has to include all perspectives towards the issue at stake. However if and to what extent the goal of inclusive decision making, by every stakeholder and given every perspective, can be reached by using these methods is worth an investigation, certainly when deliberative methods become more widely distributed.

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