{"title":"What We Can Learn from Town Meetings","authors":"Matt Leighninger","doi":"10.16997/JDD.337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.337","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a response to the special issue essays. It highlights key ideas from the articles and reflects on lessons that town meetings have for our contemporary public engagement.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117019898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond the Myth of the Town Meeting: Discursive Engagement as Governance","authors":"T. Shaffer","doi":"10.16997/JDD.338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.338","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a response to the special issue essays. It emphasizes that town meetings are a site for governance and have implications for contemporary deliberative practices.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123238977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Power and Citizen Deliberation: The Contingent Impacts of Interests, Ideology, and Status Differences","authors":"Markus Holdo","doi":"10.16997/JDD.340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.340","url":null,"abstract":"Both advocates and critics of deliberative theory have regarded power relations as problems for public deliberation. Three aspects—interests, ideology and status differences—have been thought to distort deliberative processes. This article discusses a growing body of case studies that indicate that these “problems” may actually, under certain conditions, help facilitate inclusion and equality in deliberation. The crucial task is to specify the mechanisms that explain such unexpected outcomes and the conditions under which they may appear in other cases. This article specifies three such mechanisms that help explain positive outcomes in a number of case studies. The argument for focusing on mechanisms and conditions serves as a correction both to critics who find the theory of deliberation naive and to advocates who have taken the critique against deliberative theory too lightly.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123009047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Frank M. Bryan, W. Keith, James T. Kloppenberg, Jane J. Mansbridge, Michael E. Morrell, Graham Smith
{"title":"Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings","authors":"Frank M. Bryan, W. Keith, James T. Kloppenberg, Jane J. Mansbridge, Michael E. Morrell, Graham Smith","doi":"10.16997/JDD.336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.336","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121696878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Town Meeting Ideal and Race in America","authors":"Sandra M. Gustafson","doi":"10.16997/JDD.334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.334","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the development of the New England town meeting ideal in connection with matters of race and considers the place of that ideal in post-slavery America. In particular, the essay focuses on how the black abolitionists David Walker and Maria Stewart used the jeremiad to expand the deliberative rhetoric associated with the town meeting, and it considers Albion Tourgee’s efforts to implement the town meeting system in the post-bellum South. The essay further considers the place of the lyceum system and the Chautauqua phenomenon, and it addresses how John Dewey’s efforts to reinvent the town meeting for a much larger and more diverse nation bore fruit in media forums described as town meetings. Eventually, the town meeting was reinvented yet again as a national political venue that could be used to address persistent racial tensions. The essay closes with a discussion of how the American university could help close the gap between the town meeting-style forum as a place for discussion and the historical town meeting’s value as a site of consequential decision-making.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"179 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114944862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mirage of Democracy: The Town Meeting in America","authors":"M. Zuckerman","doi":"10.16997/JDD.331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.331","url":null,"abstract":"In American mythology, the town meetings of colonial New England are the storied source of the nation’s democracy. But early New Englanders allowed the great majority of their adult males to vote only because they had no other way to secure social order. Without king, court, country lords, archbishop, or any other traditional authority, their rude frontier communities could only be ruled by public opinion. Town meetings were occasions to consolidate a popular will that could coerce the recalcitrant. They governed by common consent, but they were not democratic in any modem sense. They disallowed legitimate difference and dissent, disdained majority rule, and dreaded conflict. They were predicated on a homogeneity and a conformity that we today would find suffocating.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123953990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A ‘Peaceable and Orderly Manner’: Town Meetings and other Popular Assemblies in the American Founding","authors":"Robert W. T. Martin","doi":"10.16997/JDD.335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.335","url":null,"abstract":"The New England town meeting has often been seen as the archetypical deliberative citizen forum (see, e.g., Mansbridge 1980). More recently, political theorists have begun to appreciate the way in which any particular public forum might be better understood as part of the larger deliberative system (Parkinson, Mansbridge, 2012). Much of this work draws on modern-day examples (Parkinson 2006). But a return to the American founding era reveals that while town meetings are often praised and have many democratic virtues, they also embody a limitation on popular action generally and especially on democratic dissent.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131372960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indigenous People and the New England Town Meeting: Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1730-1775","authors":"D. Mandell","doi":"10.16997/JDD.333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.333","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1730s, Mahicans along the Housatonic River settled the mission town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They participated in town meetings and elected “traditional” leaders to typical New England offices. Even after a growing population of English settlers began dominating town offices, the Indians remained a strong presence in meetings, which was conducted in the Mahican as well as English language, and all voting done viva voce. In 1763, a major battle when an English faction tried to take control by introducing secret balloting; the Indians complained and mostly won their case. Stockbridge thus provides a case study comparing Indian and colonial New England decision-making, and highlighting the evolution of the town meeting during the 18th century.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122737747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deliberative Democracy in the Context of Town Meetings in Seventeenth-Century New England","authors":"D. D. Hall","doi":"10.16997/JDD.332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.332","url":null,"abstract":"From Alexis de Tocqueville onward, the seventeenth-century New England town has been associated with political and social practices that nurtured the making of a “democratic” society. Myth or reality? And where does the religion of the English people who founded the New England colonies figure in this story? A close examination of town and church records—which Tocqueville was unable to accomplish—reveals a powerful commitment to the core values of transparency, equity (fairness and justice), and broad participation. The “Congregational” system of church government transferred authority from any centralized hierarchy to the laymen of each local congregation. Similarly, the central governments in the colonies gave generous allocations of land to groups of immigrants, empowering them to set up self-governing towns. A crucial question for these towns was deciding how to distribute this land; another, was who could share in the decision-making. No formal or explicit “democratic” ideology accompanied the making of this civic culture, but in the context of the seventeenth century, the outcome was something unusually akin to a democratic society","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131624293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public Spheres for Deliberation on Nature? Democratic Qualities of Visitor Centres in Sweden","authors":"Elvira Caselunghe, H. Bergeå, E. Essen","doi":"10.16997/JDD.316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16997/JDD.316","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we explore in which ways and to what extent Swedish visitor centres in protected sites work as forums for public deliberation on environmental issues, such as nature conservation and natural resource management. By hosting deliberations on nature in nature the deliberation process is connected to its materiality. Nature interpretation sessions at three such centres, called naturum, were analysed to achieve a picture that displays the range of content and formats of these guided tours. To explore their deliberative democratic potential, we also examine how these nature interpretation sessions relate to societal and democratic issues in different ways. The conclusions are that naturum has an underdeveloped capacity to serve as a communicative forum for public deliberation on the environment and that the new national guidelines for naturum may contribute to renewed roles of the guide and the visitor in interpretive sessions, in which the citizen will be in focus.","PeriodicalId":147188,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Deliberation","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129717927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}