A town meeting is a form of direct democracy with deep roots in colonial New England, where eligible voters of a municipality gather in person to debate and decide local matters rather than delegating those decisions to elected representatives. The institution dates to the 1630s in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies and remains active today in much of New England, particularly in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
At an open town meeting, any registered voter of the town may attend, speak, and vote on the warrant — the published agenda listing articles to be considered. Typical articles include adopting the annual municipal budget, setting property tax rates, approving capital expenditures, amending zoning bylaws, and electing or instructing town officers. Meetings are usually presided over by a moderator elected for the purpose, and day-to-day administration between meetings is handled by a board of selectmen (or select board) and, in many towns, a professional town manager or administrator.
A variant, the representative town meeting (RTM), used by larger municipalities such as Brookline, Massachusetts, replaces universal voter participation with elected town meeting members who vote on warrant articles. This preserves the deliberative format while accommodating populations too large for plenary assembly.
Vermont observes Town Meeting Day on the first Tuesday of March as a statewide civic event, and many employers grant time off to attend. Articles on the warrant in Vermont towns have historically included symbolic resolutions on national issues — calls to end the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons freezes in the 1980s, and resolutions on the Iraq War in 2003 and 2007 — illustrating how a local institution can project political voice upward.
Political scientists, notably Frank M. Bryan in Real Democracy (2004), have studied town meetings as one of the few surviving examples of legislative direct democracy in the United States, finding that attendance correlates inversely with town population and that the format encourages substantive deliberation among neighbors.
Example
On Vermont's Town Meeting Day in March 2007, voters in dozens of towns approved warrant articles calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.