An academic view
Paula Cossart, Andrea Felicetti, James Kloppenberg. wrote a fascinating paper " The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy". They explore history ans data to provicde a clear view of the reasons of the myth, the impact and the relative decline. Excerpts
Paula Cossart, Andrea Felicetti, James Kloppenberg. Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: a Founding Myth of American Democracy. Journal of Public Deliberation, 2019, Journal of Public
Deliberation, 15 (2), 10.16997/jdd.329. hal-04249244
"The New England town meeting scaled up to the level of the nation-state. The term ‘town meeting’ is even used to describe small, unofficial electoral rallies where participants can ask the candidate questions. Yet, the original form of the meeting, giving the assembly of citizens a role in decision-making, endured and, albeit with slight changes, still persists today in a number of towns in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts
Henry David Thoreau (1973: 99) observed that: When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.
Nevertheless, commentators on town meetings have not always been so enthusiastic, as, for example, in the case of Bryan (2004). However, nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation (Fishkin, 2011).
Based on the observation that the quality of deliberation decreases as the number of participants increases, the method designed and patented by James S. Fishkin and Bob Luskin (2005) mixes polls with deliberation. (….)
Historians in particular assume that everything begins in Europe whereas a growing number of researchers now argue that “the colonists of English North America were influenced by the Native American ideal of confederation and democracy” and that “Indian democracies were democracies that Europeans admired greatlyfrom the first contacts. Many Europeans theorists compared the Iroquois to the Romans, the Greeks,and the Celts in the areas of natural rights, statecraft, oratory, and public consensus” (Grinde, 1977). (....)
In De la Démocratie en Amérique Tocqueville pointed out that Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine but that it corresponded on several points with republican and democratic theories (Tocqueville, 1835–1840; Nelson, 2005: 183; Kessler, 1992). Indeed, they criticized the Anglican and Catholic churches for being too centralized. The New England Puritans eliminated bishops in order to place power in the hands of ordinary church members. This does not mean that they believed in freedom of speech and individual rights or interests, or that they valued democracy. But, “unlike modern liberals, the Puritans attributed to the public realm a sense of In his study of Dedham, (…) James Fishkin traces the origins of his famous deliberative polls to the tradition of New England town meetings, noting that Gallup himself had entertained the idea of adapting town meeting democracy to larger populations: deliberative polls were viewed as the democratic model.
This theme became more significant after the turning point of systemic research on deliberative democracy (Mansbridge and Parkinson, 2012). This volume also welcomes Sass and Dryzek’s (2014) call for historical studies in deliberative democracy. They argue that historical insight could shed light on the complex and largely unexplored relationship between culture and deliberation.
(...) The first is that they were the result of a broader process of importing English prototypes, in turn imported from Germany. This ‘racial-cultural’ (Kotler, 1974: 79) approach was endorsed by Herbert B. Adams (1898), the main representative of the theory of the Germanic origins of New England towns. His approach was often criticized as insufficiently substantiated (see, for instance, Kellogg, 1900) or overtly challenged. For instance, Edward Channing argued that:
For example, Adams, Goodell, Chamberlain et al. (1892: 9–10), argued that early New England towns can be understood as “commercial enterprises” where town ,meetings resemble a “board of stakeholders”, implanted following the “usual way of business procedures in vogue” in commercial colonies and selectmen as a “board of directors” (see also De Wolf, 1890: 9–10
Why the decline ?
Later, the community spirit all but vanished, and participation became more anomic, partly due to the decline of the Puritan faith (Erikson, 1966). Lockridge remarks about Dedham that “The custom of decisions ‘by general agreement’ was discarded along with the passive obedience to selectmen”, and goes on to note that “by the end of its first century Dedham had a Town Meeting that could match the legend: active, suspicious, contradictory and cantankerous” (Lockridge, 1985: 124)
As towns grew in size, it became impossible for town meetings to continue to have the same role as in the previous centuries. But size was not the only issue: the population affected by the issues discussed in meetings was also becoming more diverse. Unity—or the prospect of unity—was lost, as townsmen became more polarized. For Lockridge (1985: 73), the force of division reached a peak between 1700 and 1750. In each town, historians have noted the decline of the political community which had been so valuable for town meetings. Industrialization and immigration—and the link between them—gradually sapped traditional norms. The issues faced also grew in complexity, as can be seen in the number of items in the warrants or calls for a town meeting. Some towns decided to abandon open meetings and adopted a system of representative assemblies. In justifying this shift, it is often claimed that choosing which townsmen will participate in a meeting is better than leaving the choice to chance. “Increasing population (…) tends to reduce the proportionate attendance at Town Meetings, and hence justifies a government of chosen rather than accidental and fluctuating representatives for such meetings”, remarks Alfred D. Chandler (1904: 19), about Brookline, which in 1915 became the first town in Massachusetts to abandon the traditional town meeting."