News recommender systems are an increasingly popular field of study that attracts a growing, interdisciplinary research community. As these systems play an important role in our daily lives, the mechanisms behind their curation processes are under close scrutiny. In the domain of personalized news, many platforms make design choices that are driven by economic incentives. In contrast to such systems that optimize for financial gains, there exists norm-driven diversity objectives, putting normative and democratic goals first. Their impact on users, however, in terms of triggering behavioral changes or affecting knowledgeability, is still under-researched. In this paper, we contribute to the field of news recommender system design by conducting a user study that looks at the impact of these normative approaches. We a.) operationalize the notion of deliberative democracy for news recommendations, show b.) the impact on political knowledgeability and c.) the influence on voting behavior. We found that exposure to small parties is associated with an increase in knowledge about their candidates and that intensive news consumption about a party can change the direction of attitudes towards their issues.