Measuring the Impact of Deliberation: Evidence from Lithuania’s First Citizens’ Assembly

The deliberative democracy wave that has opened up decision-making practices in Western European countries has become increasingly prominent in Central and Eastern Europe (Česnulaitytė 2024). Decades of research on deliberative democracy suggest that instruments such as deliberative mini-publics can serve as powerful antidotes to democratic challenges. They create the opportunities to practice deliberative skills central to democratic behavior and result in increased political efficacy, reduced polarisation, stronger dialogue across divides, and increased trust in democracy and the government (e.g. Fournier et al. 2011, Fishkin et al. 2021, Paulis & Pospieszna 2024, Wappenhans et al. 2024). While the impact of deliberation is typically associated with changes in beliefs related to the assembly topic, perceptions of other societal groups, as well as strengthened civic empowerment and willingness to engage in future democratic processes, it remains unclear whether these effects hold across different political contexts and deliberative mini-public designs. Building on the results of pre-, through-, and post-assembly surveys and interviews with participants in Lithuania’s first citizens’ assembly (finalised in December 2025), this paper pursues a twofold objective. First, it assesses whether the abovementioned expected impacts of citizens’ assemblies on participants are observed in the Lithuanian context, which is marked by significantly lower levels of trust in public institutions, and relatively scarce political engagement compared to Western and Northern European counterparts. Second, while existing research links participants’ socio-demographic characteristics to the impacts they experience, this paper focuses on process evaluation, examining how perceived legitimacy, neutrality, and process quality (also referred to as deliberative integrity; Parry & Curato 2024) correlate with deliberation’s impact on participants. The paper advances deliberative democracy research by extending its geographical scope and foregrounding process quality as a key yet underexplored determinant of deliberative impacts, especially in low-trust political contexts.