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This paper explores the health of local democracy by analyzing the structure and content of citizen discourse at town council meetings held to discuss the merits of Wal-Mart development in cities and towns of varying size around the country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the effectiveness of public hearings as sites of public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how our collective choices about local political boundaries affect the quality of deliberation at local public meetings. How the characteristics of our polities - such as their size or their level of diversity - affect democratic life has been an important issue for Americans at least since the debate between the Federalist and Anti-Federalists. The key insight of this paper is that the characteristics of the metropolitan areas where most Americans live are the result of our own collective political decisions. Size and diversity are not exogenous shocks to our political system; they are, instead, determined by citizens and politicians making decisions about their political communities. In other words, the political boundaries that determine the borders of our communities are functions of the democratic system itself. I contend that the way we draw our political boundaries - and especially the ways in which we attempt to carve out and preserve small places in the midst of growing metropolitan regions - has meaningful effects for the nature of the deliberation that occurs in public meetings across the United States. Though they may reflect some of the genius of federalism, fragmented metropolitan regions composed of many smaller localities create a deep challenge for civic participation at institutions like town council meetings. Smaller jurisdictions may mean higher rates of participation, but they may also frustrate key democratic aims, such as allowing citizens to fully confront and contest the differing interests and perspectives across the metropolitan region. Town council meetings in small, fragmented places may have an increased quantity of participation, but the quality of their democracy may be lower, especially from the perspective of deliberative goals. To explore these hypotheses, I employ survey data from a variety of different sources, including both national-level surveys merged with place-level data as well as surveys collected systematically in cities and towns across the country. These data include self-reports of attendance at public meetings along with respondents' attitudes about the issues under consideration. With the help of these data, I find that the challenge for effective deliberation at local public meetings is not the citizens who do show up, but the political boundaries that separate citizens from each other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morris Fiorina has recently argued that local public meetings are increasingly likely to attract only extremists who are unrepresentative of the larger, non-attending public. In this sense, he says, participants in local public meetings represent the “dark side” of civic engagement, frustrating democracy by hijacking the process and the discourse from level-headed moderates who are not motivated enough to attend meetings. In this paper, I argue that while a worrisome dark side of civic engagement surely exists, local public meetings are not the best place to find it. When it comes to ideology, the pattern of predicted attendance at public meetings is curvilinear, with moderates just as likely – and sometimes slightly more likely – to attend public meetings than those who label themselves “extremely conservative” or “extremely liberal.” In contrast, those who engage in protests or attend political rallies are significantly more likely to be found at the ideological extremes. If extremism is measured in terms of preferences about specific issues, those who attend meetings about town and school affairs do not seem dramatically different from their neighbors who do not show up at such gatherings. Meeting attenders are, however, more opinionated than non-attenders, scoring significantly higher on what social psychologists call the “need to evaluate” scale. Among participants at local meetings, this higher level of opinionation does not translate into more extreme attitudes – having an opinion, even a strong one, does not mean having an opinion that ideologically unusual. Nor are the highly opinionated who turn out at local meetings necessarily less thoughtful, less knowledgeable, or more rigid than non-attenders. Local public meetings are, for the most part, likely to be sites of good citizenship – places where citizens who show up have formed strong opinions about issues, not places where the talk is dictated by those with extreme or unusual attitudes. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]