We Can?t Even Buy Socks in Urbana!: Public Hearings, Wal-Mart, and the Quality of Local Public Deliberation.

For most Americans, having a formal say about politics on the local level likely means appearing before an elected body of decision-makers, such as a school board or town council, and expressing an opinion intended to persuade the decision-makers one way or another. Because political scientists have generally paid little attention to what is actually said at these meetings, we know almost nothing about what sort of rhetoric ordinary citizens choose to employ and whether such formal occasions at which citizens can have their say meet any of the goals deliberative theorists have for public, democratic talk. To this point, no systematic data about the nature of public discourse at such meetings has been collected. This paper aims to remedy this oversight by presenting initial results from a content analysis of public discourse at town council meetings about the merits of Wal-Mart development held in 8 communities around the country, ranging from tiny Knightdale, North Carolina to the large city of San Diego, California. We examine differences in the nature of the discourse across various political and social contexts and the extent to which local discourse meets goals deliberative theorists have articulated for effective public talk. Understanding the nature and dynamics of ordinary citizens' formal public talk in such settings is, we assert, critical to diagnosing the health of democracy generally in the contemporary United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]