Public Meetings and Deliberation

 At APSR, Jonathan E. Collins has an article titled "Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings." The abstract:

Would public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? I addressed this question by conducting an original survey with an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey featured a randomized experiment in which each study participant was shown a short clip of an actual school board meeting that was (1) a standard meeting with no public participation, (2) a meeting with public participation, or (3) a meeting with deliberation (public participation followed by a reasoned response from the school board). The experience of viewing the more participatory and deliberative school board meetings led to increased trust in local officials and a stronger willingness to attend school board meetings in the future. This study has significant implications for civic engagement, local politics, and public school governance.

From the article:

Public meetings are a critical component of American democracy. Of the most used types of political participation, attending a public meeting is the only one that allows for citizens to have direct contact with policy makers in real time. As Brian Adams (2004, 43) states, public meetings “can facilitate citizen participation and the development of good policy by assisting citizens in achieving their political goals.” Public meetings create proverbial windows of transparency, which allow for citizen oversight of the legislative behavior of political elites. Despite the utility of these meetings to American democracy, public meeting attendance as a form of political participation is underutilized. Since 2000, in each year that the American National Election Study (ANES) has been administered, only 20% to 30% of Americans report having attended at least one meeting over the course of previous the year (see Figure 11). This means that, in a given year, over 70% of Americans never attend a public meeting at all. If federal elections experienced such consistently low levels of participation, we would consider American democracy.

The threat that low and uneven public meeting attendance creates for American democracy has long been a concern for political scientists. “The town meeting has certainly lost a great deal of the power it once had, and attendance has declined,” writes Jane Mansbridge (1980, 127). As such, the findings of this study have implications for how public meetings can generate more participation and help deepen trust in local institutions, especially school boards. The evidence presented above indicates that exposing individuals to public meetings that feature direct citizen participation and public deliberation, respectively, directly leads to increased trust in local officials and an increased willingness to attend public meetings in the future. The upshot here is that vibrant, engaging meetings can beget active, well-attended meetings.

How Not to Handle the Press

At The Washington Post, Amber Phillips reports that Rep. Rod Blum (R-IA) screwed up an interview.

KCRG-TV reporter Josh Scheinblum asks Blum, who voted for the controversial House health-care bill last week, why he's checking people's IDs for a town hall later that night. For several months now, Republican lawmakers across the nation have been flooded with constituents — many but not all of them on the left — angry about the proposed changes to health care.

Blum's response to Scheinblum's question: “I don’t represent all Iowans — I represent the First District of Iowa. That would be like saying, ‘Shouldn’t I be able to, even though I live in Dubuque, be able to go vote in Iowa City during the election because I’d like to vote in that district instead?’”

“Would you still take donations from a Republican in Iowa City?” Scheinblum asks.

Blum smiles a wry smile, throws up his hands and bounces out of his chair. “I'm done here,” he says as his hands reach for his microphone to rip it off. “This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous,” he says as he unravels his microphone and drops it into Scheinblum's hands. “He’s just going to sit here and badger me,” Blum says to the children standing around him, who were supposed to underscore his support for a community center, as he walks away.

Town Halls and Deliberative Democracy

Eric Zorn writes at The Chicago Tribune:

The American town hall tradition dates back centuries, as do critiques of its fundamental flaw: "In all very numerous assemblies," observed James Madison in Federalist 55 (1788), "passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason."

Especially when passion is organized. In spring of 2009, Connecticut tea party activist Bob MacGuffie authored a widely distributed memo, "Rocking the Town Hall, Best Practices," that served as a blueprint for those who sought to turn congressional meet-and-greets into taunt-and-shrieks about then-pending health care reform legislation.
...
Activists on the political right took the lead in undermining the town hall. But those on the left have learned well from their techniques, and this summer both sides are reportedly planning to — how to put it nicely again? — orchestrate their contributions to these events; to turn "Congress on Your Corner" into "Your Congressperson Cornered," as Stanford University's James Fishkin put it.

Fishkin heads Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy and advocates replacing the shrill town hall meeting with a gathering of a "scientifically selected microcosm of a lawmaker's constituents" to provide "informed feedback" representing the district.

Sounds a bit fussy to me, but closer to the ideals of democracy than ceding the platform to the loudest, angriest factions. And a sight better than Twitter town halls, admission fee barriers and other options some representatives adopted after the harum-scarum of 2009. In fact, prior to the 2011 August recess, the No Labels nonpartisan group surveyed all members of Congress and found 68 percent of the Democrats and 51 percent of the Republicans were not planning town halls. The Washington Post reported then that the number of such meetings had fallen 24 percent since 2009.

I found no comparable figures for 2013, but my suggestion is to cut the number to zero. The Internet, 24/7 cable news and relentless operatives in these polarized, high-volume times have turned meeting rooms into stages.

And congressional representatives who want to get a handle on what their constituents really think instead of simply getting an earful need to get off their — how to put it nicely? — chairs, walk around and ask.

The Town Hall Dearth Continues

National Journal reports:

Next week’s congressional recess is formally called a “constituent work week” by the House. That name implies the traditional recess activity of hosting town-hall meetings and fielding questions from constituents.

But now, more and more lawmakers are ditching face-to-face meetings in favor of “virtual” ones held over the telephone or Internet. Whether this is an achievement for participatory democracy or a way for lawmakers to avoid potentially unpleasant interaction with angry voters is debatable.

“Let’s just say I know of a number of members who eagerly avoid real town halls and substitute them with tele-town halls,” offered Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who says he holds about 30 live events annually. He also does some gatherings by phone.

He is not the only one to notice a trend, although detailed data is somewhat elusive. No House official claims to track such information.

Virtual town halls have a couple of advantages:

• They avoid the disruptions and security risks that may come with live town halls.
• They potentially allow more people to participate. 

But there are disadvantages.  In a real town hall, voters can see how their elected officials handle pressure and whether they actually know their stuff.  In a virtual town hall, staffers can screen out challenging questions and ply unprepared lawmakers with talking points.

The Town Hall Dearth

No Labels reports:

Is your representative holding a public town hall meeting this August recess? No Labels called every office, and only 40% are scheduling open town hall meetings. It’s a sad sign of the state of affairs when our elected officials don’t have time to meet with their constituents.

No Labels activists spoke to all 430 current members of the House of Representatives to find that only 175* of them scheduled meetings. The results of the phone survey also reveal that members of both parties share the blame, with 67% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans stating they had no town hall meetings scheduled for the recess period.

*UPDATE: Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) is holding town hall meetings this month, as is Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

Last week, USA Today provided some background:

The 2009 protests over health care not only pushed the Tea Party activism to the front lines of American politics, it also changed how members of Congress interact with their constituents. And it put the sleepy August recess on the political calendar, transforming town hall meetings into made-for-YouTube events.

Matt Kibbe, the director of the Tea Party umbrella group FreedomWorks, had been organizing protests at town hall-style meetings since the mid-1990s. What made the 2009 protests possible, he said, was the ease of alerting volunteers by e-mail.

This year, a website promoted by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck gives location information, talking points and advice: "Make sure that a Tea Partier is the first person to the microphone ," the "August Action" kit says.

Even liberal groups begrudgingly admire the Tea Party tactic, and are replicating it.

"The Tea Party managed to really spook Congress with a really smart, organized effort. After a week of aggressive town-hall disruptions, they managed to create a narrative about the health care law that stuck," said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group launched in 1998.

The forums have the ability to show a depth of passion on an issue that e-mail petitions — once the staple of MoveOn's organizing — can't convey, he said.

...

Now, town-hall-style meetings are less publicized, Kibbe said. He worries his town-hall strategy may become a victim of its own success. It awakened opponents to the power of the strategy, and may discourage some members from holding open meetings. Telephone town halls, webcasts and business luncheons allow members of Congress to control the audience and the questions.

"If that's a fact, it's too bad, because it's one of the few ways I could use to know what ordinary people in my district thought," said former representative Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who heads the Center on Congress at Indiana University. "So much of the problem with our politics today is that politicians tend to interact with homogenous groups, and they therefore misinterpret a mandate."

Protesters on the left and right have drawn inspiration from Saul Alinsky. But so have their targets. Alinsky wrote:

Once a specific tactic is used, it ceases to be outside the experience of the enemy. Before long he devises countermeasures that void the previous effective tactic. Recently the head of a corporation showed me the blueprint of a new plant and pointed to a large ground-floor area: “Boy, have we got an architect who is with it!” he chuckled. “See that big hall? That’s our sit-in room! When the sit-inners come they’ll be shown in and there will be coffee, T.V., and good toilet facilities — they can sit here until hell freezes over.

Stacking Town Hall Meetings

The New York Times offers a valuable bit of background on congressional town hall meetings: activists try to stack them to their advantage.

“We need you to show up in force to make sure the far left doesn’t drown out the debate!” Tea Party activists said in an e-mail alert intended to fill as many seats as possible at a gathering that Representative David Schweikert, a freshman Republican from the Phoenix area, held Wednesday night in a police substation in Tempe.

The e-mail said the liberal group MoveOn.org was at work lining up liberals to stack the audience. Indeed, MoveOn.org is one of numerous groups across the political spectrum that have been busy organizing partisans to attend public meetings, but Mr. Schweikert still faced a generally supportive audience. Generally.

“It felt like it was me and a couple of others against everyone else,” said Ms. Gennaro, an artist and an independent, and one of a handful of critics in the audience who grilled Mr. Schweikert. “Next time, I’m going to bring more people with me.”

Every public meeting has similar nuts and bolts: the chairs, the sound system and, increasingly, with the debate over budgeting at a fever pitch, the big screen used to blow up multicolored pie charts and graphs showing government spending gone wild.

The big variable determining whether a meeting will resemble a graduate policy seminar or degenerate into a shouting match is the makeup of the audience.

Who will fill the chairs, and spring out of them to take the microphone and comment vociferously on the overhead projections, is no accident, as a glimpse behind the scenes at several meetings in Arizona last week made clear. Long before the member of Congress in question strides out in front of a crowd, activists are at work trying to shape the crowd.