Town Meeting and the double absence of the working classes: Investment in municipal government and the hierarchization of engagements in a Vermont town

Special report. Local power and the working classes in rural settings
By Ivan Bruneau
English

This article is based on ethnographic research in Miltonville, a mid-sized town in Vermont (USA) where local government is partly rooted in the existence of a Town Meeting, like many other New England towns. In Miltonville, however, this assembly is composed of 135 elected members and called a “Representative Town Meeting,” despite a marked absence of members from the working classes. Even more surprising for a leftist town like Miltonville, their absence is only rarely mentioned in discussions of the municipal government system. This article focuses on this enigma: how to explain this double absence of the working classes? After presenting the main social traits of Town Meeting representatives, the article reconstructs the processes of legitimation and modes of investment in the institution of the Town Meeting, which tend to relegate representation of different social classes to the background. To understand how this exclusion of working-class people has not been made into a public problem, the article argues that the municipal scene must be integrated into other aspects of the local political space in order to make a full relational analysis of progressive engagement.

  • Town Meeting
  • Vermont
  • municipal government
  • working classes
  • newcomers
  • institutional legitimation
  • local belonging
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info