How much political influence should we expect from minipublics?

While minipublics are currently burgeoning, their sustainability ultimately depends on their capacity to influence public decisions. For they would otherwise boil down to symbolic citizen participation and lose their credibility. Previous studies have traced the uptake of minipublics’ recommendations, but, when making their assessment, scholars rely on a set of implicit assumptions about what minipublics are supposed to achieve politically. This paper intends to problematize the concept of political influence and to write a summa of the literature on democratic theory and public policy to clarify what one should expect from minipublics. I argue that our expectations should depend on a configuration of factors. First, their political influence is contingent on two design characteristics—the number of participants and recommendations’ advisory or propositional character. Second, the content of a recommendation predisposes their impact too, as minipublics can recommend small implementation changes or a broader policy paradigm shift. We should finally expect different sorts of political influences depending not only on the policymaking stage where a minipublic is embedded, but also on the context of democratic decision-making, including decision-makers’ bounded rationality and political positions. Based on the assemblage of these factors, I develop a survey of the different forms and degrees of political influence one could—and should—expect from minipublics.