As academic and political interest in citizen participation and democratic innovations is growing, the question of their impact on public policy remains essential to assess their genuine contribution to the normative project of democratization. Impact assessments of consultative participatory mechanisms are commonly conducted with a congruency approach—a desk-based research method which assesses impact based on the textual correspondence between a citizen-created idea and public policy documents. This method, however, lacks reliability and uniformity, and this paper therefore seeks to standardize its application and ways to improve the accuracy of its results by proposing two methodological add-ons. First, a sequential impact matrix that considers the preferences of decision-makers before a consultative participatory mechanism to see the extent to which decision-makers take up citizen ideas that align with or diverge from their own agenda. Second, a mixed method that combines a congruency approach with interviews of actors involved in the follow-up of the participatory process to balance their experiences with the congruency approach’s main findings. The variants of the congruency approach are then applied to a deliberative minipublic—the citizen panel ‘Brussels—Make Your Mobility’. This analysis shows how these methodological strategies alter the impact assessment’s results, and its findings suggest that the use of a sequential impact matrix with a mixed method not only produces an accurate and reliable measurement but also generates valuable insights into the diffuse ways in which minipublics can exert substantial influences on the institutional structures and the political decision-making.

随着对公民参与和民主创新的学术和政治兴趣日益增长，它们对公共政策的影响问题对于评估它们对民主化规范项目的真正贡献仍然至关重要。协商参与机制的影响评估通常采用一致性方法——一种基于案头的研究方法，根据公民创造的想法和公共政策文件之间的文本对应关系来评估影响。然而，这种方法缺乏可靠性和统一性，因此本文试图通过提出两个方法附加项来标准化其应用和提高结果准确性的方法。第一的，一个顺序影响矩阵，在协商参与机制之前考虑决策者的偏好，以了解决策者在多大程度上采纳与他们自己的议程一致或不同的公民想法。第二，一种混合​​方法，将一致性方法与参与参与过程后续行动的参与者访谈相结合，以平衡他们的经验与一致性方法的主要发现。然后将一致性方法的变体应用于审议的小公众——公民小组“布鲁塞尔——让你的流动性”。该分析显示了这些方法策略如何改变影响评估的结果，