Measuring mediated deliberation in a comparative perspective: An analysis of Italian, French and Spanish newspapers*.

Mediated deliberation aims to investigate whether and to what extent media may contribute to the public debate by offering deliberative elements. This article investigates press mediated deliberation by presenting the results of a comparative research on Italy, France and Spain. The corpus of the analysed articles amounts to 2074 units from 15 widely circulated newspapers. Our findings suggest French newspapers are characterised by a higher degree of deliberative quality if compared to the Italian and Spanish newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]