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.

Notes

¹In towns with open town meetings, any registered voter may attend town meeting, deliberate, and vote. The history provided in Town Meeting Time indicates that

The representative town meeting developed in Massachusetts and Connecticut when towns found the open meeting unwieldy and often times unrepresentative of a cross section of the town population. In the representative (or “limited”) town meeting the citizens elect representatives to vote at the town meeting. … The representative town meeting has been adopted by vote of the town accepting a special legislative act. (Johnson et al., 1962/1984, pp. 5–6)

²Following the intensive period of fieldwork, I have periodically re-visited Amherst for informal interviews with residents to discuss town meetings. I have also regularly reviewed their Web site, containing minutes and other notices. It is worth noting that since that time, the procedures have only changed minimally. Specifically, when speakers wish to speak, they now hold up one of three cards that the Clerk has provided to town meeting members on check-in to indicate the type of speech act they wish to perform (speaking in favor of a motion or against it requires differently colored cards as does raising a question or making a comment) when the Moderator calls for speakers.

³The cultural components of communication included in Hymes' (1972) SPEAKING heuristic are scene/setting, participants, ends, acts, key, instrumentality, norms for interaction and interpretation, and genre (p. 59).

⁴While transcribing, I was most interested in content of talk and thus limited attention to linguistic and nonverbal features. I modified standard transcription styles. Statements were transcribed verbatim. Noticeable pauses were measured in seconds. Emphasis in intonation is reflected with the use of italics. When laughter or applause was present, I noted so in brackets. When I was uncertain about a word or phrase, I put the word or phrase in brackets. When a speaker abruptly stopped, I used a hyphen to mark the stop. Question marks represent rising intonation; periods mark falling intonation. Commas mark the “falling-rising contour one finds in items in a list” (Psathas, 1995, pp. 70–78)

⁵Despite the length of the meeting, the participants continue to talk; this suggests that they value and enjoy talking. Unlike the La Have Islanders, participants in Bauman's (1972) study, these participants like to talk and like talking itself. Only in the general store do La Have Islanders enjoy speaking for its own sake.