Today’s Boston Globe editorial was about how the use of creative ways to hold public meetings during the pandemic expanded opportunities for the public to participate in local governance in the Bay State. The Globe editors, who want these methods to become permanent, write:
“In New England’s civic mythology, public meetings are allegedly the building blocks of participatory democracy, where locals hash out zoning, schools, and taxes, with all residents on equal footing… It’s a pernicious fiction. As ways of collective decision-making and gathering public input, such hearings are actually terribly undemocratic. The need to physically attend a scheduled meeting is a huge barrier for people with kids, inflexible work schedules, mobility impairments, or language difficulties. As anyone who has attended one can attest, a narrow slice of the public tends to show up for meetings and hearings, one that is unlikely to be representative of the whole community… In Greater Boston, a 2018 study suggested, that means an older, whiter, more male constituency wields disproportionate influence. After the pandemic broke out last year, the state gave local boards and commissions emergency authority to switch to online meetings. Although holding school committee or zoning board meetings online isn’t perfect either, allowing people to participate remotely has proved to be a big improvement, broadening the pool of participants.”
The Globe editors correctly identify the “pernicious fiction” of direct democracy, but their apparent assumption that electronic access to public meetings will help to make public meetings more like the democratic building blocks of “New England’s civic mythology” is problematic at best. The participatory democratic theory upon which the Globe editors’ assumption rests has never faired well under scholarly scrutiny. Political scientists, in particular, have not found strong evidence for the Globe’s assumption that “broadening the pool of participants” produces “big improvement[s].” On the contrary, broadening participation can even increase the disproportionate influence of established elites.
The knowledge of average Americans, civic and otherwise, rarely bodes well for the prospects of participatory democracy. The Internet Age has not produced the democratization of knowledge acquisition imaged by late 20th century scholars and visionaries. Knowledge is definitely power but it turns out that when it comes to democratizing access to reliable information in the 21st century, truth seekers and truth tellers are very often out gunned by those willing to weaponize misinformation and disinformation to advance their narrow interests and/or undemocratic principles.
Nonetheless, the hopes of the Globe editors are virtually irresistible. Despite the mountains of empirical evidence calling into question the assumptions of participatory democratic theory, political scientists routinely qualify their analysis of this evidence the way the authors of a leading public opinion textbook I used last semester do, concluding that “[a]dditional evidence is needed to determine why citizens don’t meet the ideals of participatory democratic theorists. A better understanding of the obstacles to citizen competence and engagement would be helpful.”
The one element of the Globe editors’ position that could make their recommendations more viable is the fact that they are talking about local governance, where the “obstacles to citizen competence and engagement” might be more manageable and the elites presently exercising disproportionate influence might be less well organized and less clearly incentivized to resist such efforts. Political scientist E.E. Schattschneider famously taught us that expanding the scope of political conflict helps those not presently winning such conflicts to upset the status quo, but in the Information Age we may need to turn Schattschneider’s wisdom on its head. It may now be the case that limiting the scope of political conflict is more advantageous for the politically marginalized.
In Massachusetts, despite its progressive national reputation, progressive activists have always been and remain largely outsiders at the statehouse, where transactional politics among professional politicians and well-established special interests dominate. Even when popular policy ideas are advocated directly through ballot measures in the Bay State the results more often than not either preserve the disproportionate influence of established special interests or are ignored or modified by the state legislature after the fact.
It seems to me that the Globe editors’ and the textbook writers’ seemingly irresistible attachments to participatory notions of democratic citizenship can only be made realistic where, when, and if established political elites are incentivized to help or are, at least, not incentivized to resist. Massachusetts local government and politics in 2021 may be as close to such a place and time as we’re going to see anytime soon.
Beacon Hill policy makers have everything they need to effectively resist efforts to reform “politics-as-usual” at the statehouse and the most well-organized and well-financed special interests in the state have every incentive to attend to their interests in Boston. On the other hand, in a state where more than 70% of the 351 cities and towns are governed by Town Meetings, neither state-level policy makers nor power brokers are so well established, organized, or incentivized that they could easily fend of a well-coordinated effort by progressive activists to make local public meetings into the proving grounds of democratic citizenship we have long imagined them to be. While state legislators have little difficulty resisting calls for greater transparency or accountability at the statehouse, they would have at least some difficulty (disincentive) standing in the way of efforts to increase their constituents’ access to local government decision making. The interests that turn statewide ballot question campaigns into disinformation spectacles would also have at least some difficulty obstructing effectively localized efforts to bring greater transparency and citizen participation to local government meetings.
Well-functioning democracy requires respect for interests and principles, democratic politics and democratic governance. COVID-19 upset the status quo in uniquely useful ways for those hoping to increase citizen access to and participation in local governance, but taking advantage of this turn of events requires prudence and political savvy, not a “go big or go home” confrontational approach.
The thing is that the vast majority of towns with open town meetings do not have a majority of the population that are what might be called “progressive activists.” Progressive activists primarily get power through the primary system and the primary system in races spread over relatively large geographic areas of the state. The one exception to this might be along Western vs Eastern lines. I would say progressive activists probably do have more influence in city and town politics in places like Northampton or Longmeadow than they do in Andover.