The basic idea behind this chapter is to partly bridge the gap in previous deliberation studies by offering a sustainable model for operationalizing deliberation empirically in a comparative context. The chapter introduces the key concept of deliberation and its associated basic ideals in social science studies and overviews empirical applications of news media's deliberative performance in journalism and political communication studies. Basic principles behind the operationalization of the concept as an outcome variable of a fuzzy-set analysis are discussed and motivated. A deliberative communication index is calculated based on macro/meso level and micro-level data. Among the 14 analysed cases in the comparison, Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Austria, and Greece belong to the set of high deliberative communication, while Italy, Latvia, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Hungary are out of the set of countries with high deliberative communication.