Town Meeting as a Communication Event: Democracy's Act Sequence

Abstract

Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999 to 2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and evaluate conduct. I outline norms for deliberative democracy in a particular instantiation of democracy and show how local democracy draws from, and contributes to, the larger rhetorical-political culture in the United States. This essay contributes to studies of language and social interaction in political settings and addresses (a) the lack of communication scholarship concerning a fundamental part of New England local democracy and (b) deliberative democratic theorists' idealist notions of local democracy. Given the variety in forms of local political systems, opportunities abound for similar studies of other local democracies' ways of speaking.