This chapter investigates different roles and functions of deliberative mini-publics in representative systems. Since Archon Fung’s survey article on ‘therecipes for public spheres,’the term ‘deliberative mini-public’ has become a part of the vocabulary of democratic theory and practice. ¹Nowadays, the term refers to designs suchas citizens’ juries, planning cells, consensus conferences, Deliberative Polls, and citizens’ assemblies. ²The keydesign features of deliberative mini-publics are random selection of participants and systematic collection of evidence, for example through expert hearings, and moderated small-group discussions. Otherwise, deliberative mini-publics come in various sizes and lengths, and they produce different types of outcomes. The first pilots of randomly selected citizen forums were conducted in the United States and Germany in the early 1970s. It seems therefore fair to say that the practices of deliberative mini-publics are now middle aged. The use of deliberative mini-publics has intensified during the past few years, not least because of the pressures to deal with complex and controversial policy issues related to climate change. At the same time, the formats and purposes of mini-publics have diversified.³ This chapter points out that, after decades of experimenting, practicing, and studying randomly selected citizen forums, there is still no ‘general theory’ of deliberative mini-publics.