England Town Meeting Research Articles

New England Town Meeting and the Cultivation of Deliberative Play

Participants of New England town meeting must follow protocols to participate in this direct democratic process. Over the past 200 years, the protocols have been enacted and adapted by participants in small towns across the region. Within annual meetings, one can find small breaches that could be interpreted as playful acts. In this paper, we use the comic frame as a theoretical lens to interpret instances of such play within the rhetorical deliberation of one New England town meeting. We analyze two instances where speakers playfully use recognized parts of town meeting to achieve their rhetorical ends. We conclude with a discussion of the way play can help accomplish identification in public discourse.

Deliberative Play

This article introduces a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist in which scholars of public deliberation address the theme of “Deliberative Play” from different conceptual and empirical approaches. Here I introduce the concept of deliberative play against a background of philosophical accounts of deliberative action, the theory of metacommunication, and trends in the study of public deliberation that are endeavoring to reduce the gap between normative theories and the empirical realities of deliberative democratic practice. Articles in the special issue address several aspects of deliberative play: how storytelling activities accomplish deliberative play in online forums (Black, Wolfe, and Han); how facilitators can cue and maintain the deliberative play frame during facilitated deliberative discussions (Sprain); how playful exchanges are enabled by the structure of New England town meetings and what they accomplish (Townsend and Milburn); how alternative scenarios for action presented with pros and cons by expert consultants influence deliberative play in online discussions in Poland (Przybylska, Bucholc, and Mazur); and how online discussion interfaces would benefit from applying principles of game design (Gastil). The concluding section reflects on the results of these studies and their implications for further investigations of deliberative play.

Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy

Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in New England’s famous town meetings. Town meetings have traditionally been cited as one of the fullest and earliest realizations of the idea of democratic government and of deliberation at work. Nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation. The critical study of how one of the oldest and most inspiring forms of democratic participation has evolved is not only a fascinating endeavor in itself, it is also a unique opportunity to better understand how and to what extent these institutional practices, inspired by ideals of deliberation and participation, can support – or impede – the democratization of today’s societies.

Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings

As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees.

Sociological history of New England Town Meetings: The question of their deliberative culture

ABSTRACTHistorical New England Town Meetings have long had an important role in the collective imaginary as exemplary models of democratic participation. However, scholarly investigation has pointed to important limitations with respect to the democratic credentials of these assemblies. In this paper, we engage with recent theorising from deliberative democracy to provide an updated historical examination of the deliberative and democratic qualities of Town Meetings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. We show that Town Meetings provided a space to engage in meaningful deliberation in the context of settlers’ communities. Nonetheless, through analyses using the notions of deliberative culture and group style, we show that these communities featured deep anti-democratic norms that curtailed the democratic potential of these assemblies.

A direct test of direct democracy: New England town meetings

Representative democracies govern most locales in the US, making it difficult to compare performance relative to direct democracy. New England states, however, provide an opportunity to test both direct and representative democracy at the local level. This article uses revealed preference axioms to compare spending patterns in New England towns and cities against median voter hypothesis benchmarks. Contrary to previous evidence, we find no differences between direct and representative democracy. The results suggest that horizontal competition arising from local fragmentation minimize differences between direct and representative local government, providing support for wider applicability of median voter-based empirical models of local government behaviour in the US.

Sustainability ‘wars’ in a New England town

A research project into large group decision-making in a New England Town Meeting surprised us with the degree to which sustainability came to be the axis around which political debate revolved. We identified two very different yet overlapping conceptions of sustainability: one emphasized fiscal responsibility; the other asserted the merits of environmental stewardship. Each of the two conceptions had proponents, with strong views about what constituted good versus bad governing practices, each with a strong sense of what was good for the town. In this paper, we sort out those meanings. We seek to understand and expose the contours of sustainability, how the discourses around sustainability enter political processes, and to shed light on ongoing debates about the form of governance best suited for a democratically inclined New England town. Methods involved both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including data collection and analysis activities that comprised four levels: (1) participant observation of the Town Meeting; (2) quantitative analysis of voting behaviors; (3) interviews with 30 of the 240 members of the Town Meeting; and (4) thematic analysis, codebook development, and coding. Finally, in the spirit of contributing to the making of a future possible world, the authors ponder the courses forward for democratic processes and the future of a town caught in a ‘pitched battle’ over the terms and stakes of sustainability.

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works

Book Reviews

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works, by Frank M. Bryan Laurence PiperFabricating Foucault: Rationalising the Management of Individuals, by Roger Deacon Maria Tamboukou

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works. By Frank M. Bryan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 312p. 19.00 paper.This book joins a small number of empirical studies about direct democracy and, specifically, the town meeting. Frank M. Bryan is author, coauthor, or editor of 11 books, including Politics in the Rural States (1981) and The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989). Here, he unveils an incredible set of discoveries that fills a major gap in the literature on democracy and the town meeting. Other prominent scholars who have tackled some of these salient issues are Joseph Zimmerman (The New England Town Meeting, 1999) and Jane J. Mansbridge (Beyond Adversary Democracy, 1980), both of whose works are referenced extensively in Real Democracy.

Citizen Participation in Local Politics: Evidence from New England Town Meetings

Citizen Participation in Local Politics: Evidence from New England Town Meetings

June Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Peter Augustine Lawler. Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought.Ronald Keith Gaddie and James L. Regens. Regulating Wetlands Protection: Environmental Federalism and the States.Joseph F. Zimmerman. The New England Town Meeting ‐ Democracy in Action.

Dial-In Democracy: Talk Radio and the 1994 Election

Detractors call them right wing nuts, apostles of hate, fomenters of violence. Fans hear them as inspirational, voices of reason, enlighteners of the public. Similarly, their audience is portrayed as maladjusted, intolerant, and dangerous -or as guardians of the republic, socially conscious, and public spirited. Talk radio, its hosts and listeners: Is it a bedlam of conservative yakkers? A forum for seditionists? An electronic version of New England town meetings? Is it all of the above, some, or none?' Whether characterized as laboratories of demagogeury or of democracy, talk radio has become a staple of American political discussion, especially since the 1994 election the political tsunami that uprooted scores of Democratic members of Congress, senators, governors, and state legislators. The election ended forty years of Democratic dominance of the House of Representatives, over sixty years of control of state houses and legislatures, and perhaps laid the groundwork for the sixth realignment of the American party system (or signaled continuing dealignment).2 Republicans won 230 seats in the House of Representatives, picking off 52 formerly held by Democrats, with 52 percent of the national House vote. The Republicans also gained control of the Senate by capturing eight

New England Town Meeting: Safeguard of Democracy

New England Town Meeting: Safeguard of Democracy