The increased interest in deliberative minipublics has generated a debate about their proper role within processes of political decision-making and of constitutional review and amendment. A key question in this debate is whether it is democratically legitimate to confer decision-making authority upon minipublics. To help answer this question, I distinguish between proposals that seek to empower minipublics to do the deliberating and deciding for the rest of the citizenry, and proposals that seek to institutionalize minipublics with the aim of empowering the entire citizenry to influence policy making, set the political agenda, and have the final say on certain political decisions. In contrast to empowered uses of minipublics that would bypass the citizenry’s political deliberation, I argue in favor of using minipublics for contestatory, vigilant, and anticipatory purposes. These uses would improve the quality of deliberation in the public sphere while strengthening citizens’ democratic control over political decisions. Regarding proposals for embedding minipublics within processes of constitutional review and amendment, I argue that they need to identify institutional ways of securing a strong feedback loop between deliberation within constitutional minipublics and deliberation in the wider public sphere throughout the process.