Can local mini-publics invigorate democracy?

People feel increasingly disconnected from representative democracy. To address this, governments and organizations have explored ways to involve citizens more directly in decision-making. Deliberative mini-publics constitute one such attempt. This study assesses effects of a randomised mini-public in a rural municipality on attitudes towards democracy in the community's wider public. The citizen council convened from December 2024 to January 2025 and discussed the future of the run-down local event hall. It concluded in February 2025 with a presentation at the municipal council. To examine the citizen council’s effects on the community, we conducted two survey waves among all adult residents of the municipality (N = 10,500), both before and after the implementation of the citizens' council. 625 respondents completed both survey waves. Our study design allows us to leverage three treatment levels for causal inference: (1) randomly assigned invitations to declare one’s willingness to participate in the citizen council, (2) networks (family and friends) of the 30 actual participants of the citizen council, and (3) the entire population of the municipality compared with a matched control sample generated from two parallel waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). We find no effect of the invitation treatment. The network treatment increased respect for compromise in politics. The municipality treatment increased satisfaction with democracy and reduced the perception that politics is 'all talk, no action'. The study has been preregistered.