Deliberative Democracy in the Context of Town Meetings in Seventeenth-Century New England

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

An Enduring System of Local Deliberative Democracy: The 21st Century Legal and Normative Structure of Massachusetts Town Meeting

“…Town meeting today, which traces its beginnings to the 17th century American colonial period (Zimmerman 1999;Adams 1892;Hall 2019), has a defined role within a federal system. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the people of the United States agreed to vest certain powers of the states in the new federal government and to make those powers supreme.…”

Applying mixed methods action research to explore how public participation in an Indian City could better resolve urban sustainability problems

“…Globally, deliberative democracy initiatives range from 100% participatory budgeting in Australia (Christensen & Grant, 2017; Weymouth & Hartz-Karp, 2019), to constitutional reform in Ireland (Carolan, 2015) and Turkey (Baburoglu & Goker, 2014); and the recent Citizens Assemblies on climate change in Europe and the UK. 1 In some countries, deliberative democracy initiatives have been institutionalised in legislation, for example, the Citizens Initiative Review in the USA 2 and an ongoing randomly selected Citizens Council in East Belgium 3 (Chwalisz, n.d. ).…”