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Small scale citizen involvement processes can only play a role in mass democracies if they manage to impact the wider public. But does involvement of citizens in political decision-making processes increase perceptions of democratic legitimacy among citizens who were not involved? If so, why? Drawing on procedural fairness theory, we argue that learning about the use of small scale citizen involvement processes signals to citizens that the authority respects them, is interested in their views and experiences and takes them seriously. Drawing on three survey experiments (n= ca. 700 per experiment), we find that information cues about citizen involvement in a political decision-making process lead to higher perceptions of fairness. This holds even when the outcomes of the process are unfavorable and the issue is highly contested. These findings open up exciting possibilities to enhance the legitimacy fostering functions of smallscale citizen involvement procedures.