Bridging deliberative democracy and crisis management scholarship, we construct theoretical expectations about the role of deliberative minipublics in fostering public compliance with difficult political decisions. Our expectations are tested with a randomized cross-national survey experiment (United States and United Kingdom, N = 2088), in which respondents read a realistic news item depicting a political decision-making process leading to the extension of COVID-19 lockdown measures that follows either a (1) citizen deliberation, (2) public consultation, (3) politician deliberation, or (4) nothing. The findings show minipublics are unlikely to foster public compliance during a health crisis. On the contrary, reading about a minipublic could decrease compliance when individuals are distrustful of minipublics. This study has implications for citizen participation, deliberation, and leadership during future pandemics.