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Would local public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? When political scientists identify and measure political participation, they regularly list public meeting attendance alongside activities like voting, volunteering with a campaign, and donating to a campaign as indicators of a vibrant democracy (Putnam 2000; Skocpol and Fiorina 1999; Verba and Nie 1972). Public meeting attendance, however, is noticeably distinct from these other major forms of participation; while it arguably influences election outcomes the least, it provides the greatest opportunity for an individual to directly observe, or even affect, policy decisions. This opportunity for efficacy is particularly available at the local level, where school boards and city councils govern within reach of the citizenry.
Despite its promise, very few studies in political science focus on public meeting attendance at the local level. The few recent studies that do focus on this topic highlight the characteristics of Americans who are more likely to attend these events (Einstein, Glick, and Palmer 2019; Oliver 2000; Schaffner, Rhodes, and La Raja 2020), but they rarely focus on the role of institutions when attempting to understand patterns of public meeting participation. As a result, questions remain as to what techniques and strategies local officials can employ in order to increase public participation, especially among marginalized groups whose policy needs often go unrepresented.
To help fill this gap, I examine the extent to which randomly exposing individuals to a public meeting that is more engaging—versus a typical administrative meeting with few opportunities for participation—influences their trust in local officials and their stated propensity to attend a school board meeting in the future. I draw from the literatures on participatory and deliberative democracy to add nuance to conceptions of participation and engagement. I look at the effect of attending a participatory meeting that features other citizens participating directly without a response from a public official (Pateman 1970). I also measure the effect of a meeting that features public deliberation—that is, citizen participation with a reasoned response (Cohen 1989)—which in this case comes directly from local officials. I was particularly interested in the influence of seeing these types of meetings on members of social groups toward which local governments tend to be unresponsive (Hajnal...