Legal Commentary

The spectacle of President Obama's town meetings on healthcare reform inspires my question. President Obama did not invent this device -- it really hit its stride in the 1990s, when the Clintons discovered its potency as a stage for an empathetic politico -- but I wish that Obama would forego its use. The problem is that town meetings (as the name implies) require town residents' dealing with town policies. When this essentially local procedure is dragooned into the task of discussing, say, national health care policy, the result is necessarily fake, an exercise in PR rather than democracy.

As William Fischel, the Dartmouth economist, has argued in his Homevoter Hypothesis (Harvard University Press 2001), local residents have both the incentive and capacity to gather information spontaneously about local politics -- zoning, local services, taxes, schools, etc. -- because these affect their property values in intense and immediate way and because the sources of information are close at hand. But the participants in "town" meetings about national policies have no such incentives. As Adam Ferguson observed a decade ago when the national "town" meeting was still a fresh campaign technique, the town meeting on national policy is "Ye Olde Town Gimmick" -- a Potemkin Village of policy ignorance, partisan high jinks, or (where a politician can screen the audience) soporific mutual admiration ("That's an excellent question! And this Administration cares about working families....")

The really repulsive aspect of national "town" meetings is that, by providing the simulacrum of participatory democracy, they crowd out consideration of the real thing. There are interesting proposals out there to create lay assemblies that, like juries, would be exposed to an array of expert and political testimony and forced to deliberate for an extended period before making a recommendation. Ethan Leib, my co-prawf, is a vigorous defender of one such type of institution, and citizens' assemblies have been tried in British Columbia to push electoral reform with mixed success. Of course, there is always our home-grown version -- the real town meetings that deals with real town policies: I recommend Frank M. Brayan, Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works (U. of Chicago Press 2004) for a detailed study.

By contrast with these institutional solutions to collective action problem of information acquisition in a democracy, the national "town" meeting feeds the myth that participatory democracy is can be acquired on the cheap without the hard work of actually studying the issues being discussed. So call them "talk shows," "focus groups," "photo ops" -- anything but what they are decidedly not: viz, a town meeting of citizens actually engaged in self-government.