How to Bring Public Meetings Into the 21st Century
This is republished from the National Civic Review, publication of the National Civic League (U.S.)
Editor’s Note: The mission of the National Civic League’s Center for Democracy Innovation is to understand, test, and disseminate innovations that can make democracy more participatory, equitable, and productive. Center staff works to sustain democracy by inviting people to help redesign the “civic infrastructure” of their communities, scale democracy through strategies for inclusive engagement to improve equity and governance and measure the quality of democracy and engagement.
In 2023, the Center launched the “Democracy Innovations for Better Public Meetings” project, working with three pilot communities. The project consisted of community engaged research, a civic infrastructure scan, creating a public evaluation tool called a “civic scorecard,” and providing a set of detailed recommendations to each community. In this “dispatch from the field”, Nick Vlahos, Deputy Director of the Center for Democratic Innovation, offers insights gleaned from his work on the project.
One of the aims of the Center for Democracy Innovation’s Better Public Meetings project is to help communities make their public engagement processes more deliberative. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy defines deliberation as “mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interests regarding matters of common concern.” To the extent that a democracy values and implements public deliberation, we would call it a deliberative democracy.
Authentic public deliberation seldom happens in the official interactions between citizens and government in America today. To our knowledge, there are no city council meetings in the United States that break out into deliberative discussions, and this is what we’d like to see happen. There are parallel institutionalized processes, such as Belgium’s deliberative committees, that involve deliberation between elected officials and constituents, but not in primary legislative meetings.
As it stands, public meetings retain an archaic form of public participation that is often found to be problematic, and yet little has changed in their format over time. Typically, public engagement consists of showing up to a dais and speaking into a microphone (and this isn’t even guaranteed) for two/three minutes on agenda items or at a portion of an agenda that is open for general comment. There is no sequence of phases as you find in a deliberative process such as a citizens’ assembly. Officials rarely respond directly to members of the public, and the public often uses this opportunity as a cathartic moment to express anger at the decision-making process.
Currently, the dynamic of public hearings, city council meetings, boards and commissions, school board governance meetings, is that small groups of vocal minorities dominate public portions of the agenda. Often the same few people recurringly show up, who are not reflective of the broad diversity of the population, and they speak in problematic ways, so much so that many of these meetings now require significant forms of police/security presence for safety, and public officials toy with the idea of shutting down public comments altogether.
One of the initial criticisms of deliberative democracy revolved around the tension between rational discussion and other speech cultures, including emotional forms of expression. This carries forward to this day and sits at the heart of some of the most pressing roadblocks to innovating democratic institutions, specifically official public meetings.
Our team has attempted to insert deliberation into formal legislative, city council, and board meetings, an effort that has been praised by key allies. What we heard back from official bodies is an initial willingness to experiment with a related form of meetings known as “study sessions.” These precede public meetings in which items are voted on and are spaces where elected officials learn about the technicalities of select issues. The willingness to experiment at an official study session presents a first of its kind opportunity because these meetings are more like fishbowls. The members of the public can observe but have no ability to participate.
At the same time, there are natural opponents to innovation. Critiques have come from the public, staff members, and elected officials. Some don’t want to hear the public spew misinformation and hate. Some people feel government officials make decisions without ample public input. Meanwhile, both sides tend to blame one another for a lack of change. Opposition to changes in public participation can come from both sides.
This sort of reaction raises questions for practitioners about how to have competing interests see eye to eye, factor in their concerns, and pave the way for better democratic relationships.
At the culmination of our research, we hosted a public event to give a presentation to a community about our recommendations to innovate council meetings. One of the detailed recommendations was to eliminate the existing public comment time, consistent with the law, and to transform that period into an opportunity for the members of the public to spend an hour in discussion with elected officials.
The word “eliminate” immediately raised concerns.
Given the opportunity to change official public comment processes through our pilot and shift to what we call a deliberative public comment at round tables with neighbors and elected officials, to have an informed and norms guided discussion, the feedback we received was that:
- We’re trying to eliminate the right to present and express opinions to officials and to the community.
- We’d ostensibly silence people by making them speak in contained tables.
- It would be a free-for-all.
The last two concerns were particularly worrying because we offered detailed prescriptions that were meant to give more voice and structured conversation.
Fortunately, after the meeting there was an exchange between members of the community published in a local newspaper that largely appreciated our nuanced ideas. But that doesn’t get rid of the challenges associated with trying to innovate formal institutions. There is a discrepancy between what practitioners mean and what gets lost in translation when offering ideas that involve innovations to processes that people may have an arguably unhealthy attachment to simply because that’s how they’re used to doing things.
Deliberation is not necessarily a language that the public and officials are familiar with, and it’s not a given why they should want it. It is the responsibility of the practitioner to convey to the public clear reasons for change and how that change could be better than what currently exists. What we might feel is a straightforward idea in changing processes that many people seem to dislike is not automatically reflected in the public’s vision of how deliberation with elected officials might amplify their voices. We need better ways to inform the public and have them even more involved to ensure that proposed changes are viewed as enhancing voices, not undermining them.
It is both interesting and ironic that the public might view reason-giving deliberation as a tool to silence people. The reality is that the lack of trust in and skepticism of government means that when officials want to make meaningful changes, people might feel as though government is trying to pull a fast one. Additionally, we must grapple with the possibility that members of the public with louder voices think having a couple moments at a microphone is better, and often just want to use this time to vent.
The flipside is that most experiences that elected officials have with the public involve what they feel to be a select few voices sucking the oxygen out of the room. Consequently, they are reluctant to allow a platform for those members who seem unwilling to have a reasoned discussion.
Therefore, this should be a real concern for proponents of deliberative democracy. Early critiques of deliberative democracy by some scholars focused on voices being silenced by deliberative reasoning, but now we may be witnessing the reverse scenario – voices might be silenced because there is a lack of deliberation and a reluctance to innovate when it comes to official public meetings. The goal of public meetings shouldn’t only be about better outreach for existing mechanisms. It also should be about how to transform how public discourse operates in formal spaces.
