Multiple people who read my writing commented that my writing, especially the political content, is hard to follow. I recalled how confusing it was for me when I started attending government meetings and working for the government. The United States has a well-known civics gap (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/political-communication/civics-knowledge-survey/), and I think some of it has to do with the lack of an accessible guide to address ever increasing complexity. By civics, I am going to refer to the dictionary definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civics): “a social science dealing with the rights and duties of citizens.”
This article is my personal attempt at helping people start civic learning and engagement. Civics can teach people about the limits of government power and the limits of the public’s power to influence the government. It can help people better understand policy positions of different candidates when voting. Civic engagement is not limited to speaking at intimidating meetings. It includes learning about the government, watching government meetings either online or in-person, and talking with your friends.
This guide has my opinions on how the government works and how to interact with it. There might not be a Part 2, but I wanted to keep that possibility open. Unlike many other articles, it does not have an introductory summary section. I will instead try to write concise yet free-flowing sections that are numbered. Since I currently live in Massachusetts, I will focus on MA, but many of the ideas are broadly applicable.
Basics on Interacting with the Government
1. These two sources are good places to start.
I would say watch the NPR video first, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMqEnmDp2m8, and then read the MMA article, https://www.mma.org/local-government-101/. MMA stands for Massachusetts Municipal Association, not Mixed Martial Arts. It is a group composed of local government officials that advocate before the State government. If the MMA article gets too complex, you can just skim through it.
You might notice that guides on civics tend to present sanitized views on civic engagement without mentioning barriers and conflicts. I do not think it is all malice but has more to do with concerns about showing uncomfortable flaws in governments and people. An official and practical civics guide discussing the messiness of real-life would be helpful, but if elected officials wrote such a guide, they might lose their chances at reelection. An informal guide through personal mediums such as this blog might be better places for more nuanced and critical ideas.
2. Showing up is half the game.
If you are not sure about wanting to be civically engaged, the first step is to attend a meeting that sounds interesting. People tend to be disengaged from the government because of a lack of interest, time constraints, barriers to entry, etc. By simply attending a government meeting, you are already well ahead of many people when it comes to civic engagement. If you are too busy or intimidated, you can watch the meetings on your computer, but it would not give you a full sense of how these meetings run. By law, most government meetings have to be open to the public. Some exceptions are ones dealing with sensitive matters like lawsuits, labor negotiations, and character disputes. These are allowed or required to be held behind closed doors and are typically called “Executive Sessions.” I suggest attending local government meetings because they are much more accessible than state or federal government meetings that usually happen only in large cities. Cities and towns are jointly called “municipalities”. They have some important differences I will cover in the next section.
If you want to know where the next meetings are, start by looking at the government website – which can be confusing – or by contacting the municipal clerk. The clerk typically manages the overall calendar. Depending on whether you live in a city or a town, a city council meeting or a town selectboard meeting would be a good one to start. The city council and the town selectboard have very different functions, but they still cover the overall affairs of the municipality. The meetings usually happen once or twice a month.
There are also board and committee meetings that focus on specific topics such as land development and traffic safety. The differences between boards and committees are not always very clear, but boards tend to make permit decisions while committees make recommendations. School Committee (Called School Board in some states) meetings cover local education policies, with the superintendent being present at most meetings. While it is obviously up to you to attend them, I personally found them to be long and contentious, making them not the best introductory meetings into government affairs.
You do not even have to physically show up. Most local governments, even for small towns, have YouTube channels managed by local community media organizations. The media organizations live stream core meetings like city council meetings and upload most of the past meetings. You don’t have to sit through the whole thing if you find it too long. Do not be surprised if you see fights break out between government officials or between the government officials and general members of the public. Oh, and I have seen general members of the public get into fights between themselves.
In these meetings, there is usually time reserved for general public comments. And then the officials start discussing what is on the agenda. MA State government encourages but does not require public comments in all meetings, except for a special type of meeting called “hearings.” With hearings, somebody is proposing to do something that will likely impact neighbors, e.g. building a new apartment complex or a new power pole, so people concerned have a chance to chime in. Many meetings limit the comment per person to two to three minutes to allow for multiple people to speak. If you decide to speak at a public meeting – you might sometimes be the only one – it can be helpful to have a script written in advance to stay within the time limit. If you just started learning about the local government, it can be helpful to hold off speaking until you get a better sense, but if you want to speak up about a matter you are passionate about, it is your right.
You might notice that government officials discuss agenda items in a structured way, using expressions like “I make a motion.” and “Point of Order!” This format is the “Robert’s Rules of Order”, which was originally a format designed for efficient military (!) meetings. Almost all United States government meetings adopted this format from my observation. While they can add structure to meetings, my experience is that people can exploit the format to intimidate and interrupt others. For example, “Point of Order” is one of the few allowed ways to interrupt somebody if you think they are committing a procedural violation. The chair of the meeting is then required to respond with an interpretation on whether there was a violation. I have seen both cases where people raised valid claims versus questionable claims that disrupted another person’s speech. As an item on an agenda is wrapping up, somebody will “make a motion” for a specific course of action, somebody else will second it, and then the officials will vote to approve or disprove that action.
3. Governments are hierarchical and distributed.
In the United States, the hierarchy is Federal -> State -> County (Not all states have them, including MA) -> Local (Cities and towns, also called municipalities). The law is also hierarchical. The lower laws cannot contradict or have looser restrictions than the higher laws, unless the higher laws allow for them. Very roughly from my limited understanding, at the federal level, the law hierarchy is Constitution -> US Code (Despite the name, these are general laws based on the constitution) -> Code of Federal Regulations (Administrative code for carrying out the constitution and US Code). In Massachusetts, the hierarchy roughly goes: State constitution -> Massachusetts General Laws -> Code of Massachusetts Regulations -> Local charter -> Local administrative code (How the municipal government is organized) -> Local ordinances (cities) and bylaws (towns). Note that people and documents mix up these terms often.
The classic distribution of power in a democracy is the three branches of government. Legislative (Makes the laws); Executive (Carries out the laws); and Judicial (Interprets the laws, usually around disputes). This distribution pattern repeats itself at the federal-to-local hierarchies described above. In MA, a local city government typically has an elected city council as the legislative branch and an executive branch that has as its chief an elected mayor, a city manager appointed by the city council, or both. Whether a town or a city, it also has an elected school committee. It can be helpful to put down these structures in an organizational diagram to improve your understanding.
The city council is the legislature who can change (“amend”) laws. They also function as a check-and-balance for the executive branch by reviewing and approving broad-level budgets and actions. The school committee focuses on the school department. Its members are policymakers, not day-to-day administrators. While they are not explicitly named as legislators, their function somewhat falls into that since their job is setting the overall policies. They oversee the chief school administrator, the superintendent, and have the power to hire and fire the superintendent as a group. Both the city council and the school committee are similar to the Board of Directors in a private organization.
Town governments are organized differently from city governments. The selectboard is the chief executive branch while the Town Meeting is the legislative branch. Towns usually have town managers (sometimes called administrators) to manage the day-to-day operation. Town Meetings usually happen on an annual basis while selectboard meetings happen more often on a monthly basis. One nuance is that 14 cities in MA like Amherst and West Springfield call themselves towns. What they call town council meetings might actually be city council meetings. I think this should not be an allowed practice since it is confusing. From the MMA guide:
The judicial branch is the court system. They interpret the laws, often for legal disputes. In MA, the courts are a part of the State government despite their names usually containing the county names. If an issue goes to the courts, it is usually not fun times. You probably need to hire a lawyer and go through a lengthy and expensive process even before you go to trial. If the government decides to prosecute you for a potential crime, it is a criminal trial. If the dispute has not risen to a level of a crime, whether it is between private parties or between the government and a private party, it’s a civil trial.
4. When learning civics, many struggles involve inconsistent or bad naming.
At the MA state level, the legislators are called the “General Court”, making them sound like the judicial branch. Also, zoning codes for a city are called “zoning ordinance” while for a town are called “zoning bylaws.” One trick when you encounter a confusing name is to make a mental note and give it a more clear personal nickname. You can also reach out to somebody who is more familiar to get clarification.
The State law sets overall structures for local governments but allows for customization of department names and organizations. With MA having 351 cities and towns, this customization is one of the challenges in understanding MA local governments. For example, one city might have a planning department that combines multiple roles such as economic development, zoning, and conservation while another might have separate departments. The names used for government departments are not very uniform. Even within the same municipal government, the terms “office” and “department” are used interchangeably. I noticed that smaller departments tend to call themselves “offices” while bigger departments with multiple sub-departments tend to call themselves “departments”.
5. Much of interacting with the government is about knowing where to go to find what you need, not knowing everything.
Most departments have people whose job is the answer daily questions. With smaller departments, you might end up talking right away with the department head, and bigger departments often have lower-level administrators whose job is to answer questions and determine if they need to be forwarded to the department head. Also, the websites can be useful sources of information even if they can be confusing. They are organized as a hierarchical knowledge tree. You start with the broadest topics and navigate down to the more detailed documents. Property parcels and project applications almost always have unique IDs, so if you know the ID of what you are looking for, you can find information on them quicker.
If you are struggling to find what you want, you can contact the appropriate government department official for help. Even if you are not sure which department to call, it can be helpful to just make a call. Hopefully, after some round of call forwarding, you will reach the right official. More complicated questions can involve multiple departments. When somebody says, “I have a quick question,” it might be a complicated set of questions disguised as a simple question, e.g. “How do I build a house?”
Darker Ideas
This section goes into more critical parts of human nature and limits when it comes the governments. It can be helpful to have these ideas in mind as you start learning about the government.
1. Even with small municipalities, representing all voices equally is practically impossible.
Representative government is a way of aggregating voices and simplifying choices so that a community can make group decisions with some level of efficiency. Since there are many people and many different opinions, trying to give everyone the same amount of speaking time can be difficult. In real life, very few people show up for meetings, but in theory, if everybody shows up, it can possibly paralyze the process. In a hypothetical small town of 10,000 people, if everybody gets a minute to speak, that is about 167 hours. Also, since people have conflicting goals and priorities, it is impossible to implement a solution that would make everyone equally happy.
2. Because people have finite capacities, they have to pick and choose their priorities.
People’s daily lives face constant pressure from increasing private demands (advertisements, work pressure, more technology, businesses charging higher prices for products and services, etc.) and public demands (longer meetings, more complex laws and application forms, increasing amount of required or “recommended” public education, increasing tax burden, etc.). Even small local governments generate more information in a week than most people can keep up with. One negative side effect of increasing demands is that people who show up and dominate meetings tend to be well-off retirees and trust fund recipients who have more time and resources. Over-representation of powerful minorities is an oft-discussed topic in political science. “Who Really Attends Public Meetings” (https://pac.org/impact/really-attends-public-meetings) covers it briefly. “Tyranny of Minority” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2023.) is a whole book about this topic.
3. The medium and the messenger are the message.
Who shared information on what medium – social media, official documents, newspaper – can have large influences on people’s reaction to the information. Even if the information is accurate and laid out well, if it comes from somebody that people dislike or distrust, they will tend to dismiss it. I have my share of people who do not like me, and I found that sharing my ideas and documents with them is nearly impossible. Some people tend to ignore official documents and only rely on social media as their source of news due to time constraints or dislike of the government. The issue with that approach is becoming reliant on an arbitrary group of people for interpreting a complex set of ideas rather than interpreting it themselves. The irony is that the proxy interpreters are usually looking at government documents and meetings, albeit by taking a narrow snapshot.
4. People form communities through shared stories or complementary stories.
The stories are a mixture of hope and fear. In a highly centralized society, where a small number of people have concentrated control of stories and resources, the lives of many people are subject to the emotional whims of a few people. And there is no guarantee whatsoever that the people in power have stable emotions. In small communities, even if somebody does not have outsized power, they can more easily co-opt the local narrative via social media and public appearances.
5. Small municipal politics is one of the cheapest and quickest way to reinvent oneself.
This nature of small municipal politics exposes it to exploitation by people with motives beyond the ideal goal of serving the community. We are all complex beings with a mixture of different motives – compassion, self-aggrandizement, greed, anger, unresolved trauma, etc. These motives play out in messy ways in all parts of life, including the government.
This is the end of this guide.
Thank you for reading it. If I decide to write Part 2, I will probably go into more technical topics such as:
1. The three pillars of government transparency: Open Meeting Law. Public records. Conflict of Interest.
2. Tax collection and Proposition 2-1/2.
3. Zoning amendments.
4. Robert’s Rules of Order.