Mobilizing and Transformative Organizing In-Action at the New England Town Meeting

This paper identifies examples of mobilizing and organizing in the New England Town Meeting. Mobilizing and organizing are frameworks of collective action. Organizing has a transformative effect on individuals while mobilizing does not. The open New England Town Meeting, as it is conceptualized in this paper, consists of participation, deliberation, and governance. The data for this paper comes from the case of Brentwood, New Hampshire’s 2023 Town Meeting. The researcher created field notes using ethnographic participant observation and video which were analyzed using latent content analysis. This paper found that examples of mobilizing consist of invoking a higher authority, using data, continuously pushing for a position, simplifying policy, and acting with emotion. For organizing, this paper found examples of using experience, asking information gathering questions, sharing ideas, and modifying the process. Themes found throughout these examples include authority, discovery, process, and emotion. This paper supports mobilizing and organizing as distinct types of collective action. Transformation is a key aspect of organizing, and thus organizing, in its forms and occurrences, may be a helpful tool to analyze and ensure healthy democracies. This paper develops the participatory deliberative governance concept which incorporates transformation into participatory and deliberative democratic theory.