Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

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Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works. By Frank M. Bryan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 312p. $49.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

This book joins a small number of empirical studies about direct democracy and, specifically, the town meeting. Frank M. Bryan is author, coauthor, or editor of 11 books, including Politics in the Rural States (1981) and The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989). Here, he unveils an incredible set of discoveries that fills a major gap in the literature on democracy and the town meeting. Other prominent scholars who have tackled some of these salient issues are Joseph Zimmerman (The New England Town Meeting, 1999) and Jane J. Mansbridge (Beyond Adversary Democracy, 1980), both of whose works are referenced extensively in Real Democracy.