Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many U.S. citizens don’t care to differentiate.
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Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation by Jonathan Beecher Field is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
