What is the most pure form of democracy? Some argue that it is the New England Town meeting where neighbors make decisions face-to-face on the issues that affect them.

In this project we collect data from town meeting; including acts of participation, attendance and the number and types of votes. In 2018, our team of researchers from UVM, Castleton and Northern Vermont University collected data from 38 Vermont town meetings.

Read a brief summary report on the data or view the raw data (Excel Spreadsheet) or read the story in VT Digger or the interview with Center Director Richard Watts on VPR. Additional analysis will be posted here as we work our way through more than 600 pages of data.

This project follows the work of political scientist Frank Bryan, who with his students attended more than fifteen hundred Vermont town meetings over a 30-year period, documenting Vermont’s town meeting as an authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. See video with three students talking about town meeting democracy.

Find out more about Dr. Bryan's research in his book REAL DEMOCRACY or by reading "All Those In Favor" by Susan Clark and Frank Bryan. Learn more by watching the video below of a 2013 interview with Frank (full transcript here), by reading an interview between Frank and Center Director Richard Watts, or by visiting his webpage.

This project is in collaboration with Rich Clark, Director of the Castleton Polling Institute, Castleton University, David Plazek, Political Science Department, Johnson State College and Robert Williams’s Backpack Journalism class.

Generous support provided by donors to the Center for Research on Vermont and the FAO Schwarz Family Foundation.