2018 Town Meeting
Summary of Findings
In his book Real Democracy, Dr. Bryan discusses Proctor’s history as a mining town with strong union membership and a stronghold of the Proctor dynasty from which four of Vermont’s governors came. In the long term data, Proctor came in dead last on the Real Democracy Index. Dr. Bryan shows that the male dominated structures of the mining union and the power dynamics of the family owned mining business contributed in a large part to the low score. Additionally, they hold their meeting at night which hurts their score a lot. This was true for the 2018 meeting as well. Proctor had the lowest Real Democracy score of the towns we studied. Only 42.8% of attendees were women with only 30% of participants being women. Unfortunately, we do not have data on which articles each person participated on, but participation was also ow overall with less than half of the participants engaging more than once.
Major Data Points
| Year | Peak Attendance | Attendance Rate* | Participation Rate | Real Democracy Score** | Population | Meeting Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 63 | 5.32% | 15.87% | 21.19 | 1741 | 1:26 |
| 2002 | 115 | 10.06% | 26.09% | 36.15 | 1143 | 2:08 |
| 1998 | 72 | 6.02% | 22.22% | 28.24 | 1197 | 0:59 |
| 1992 | 99 | 7.57% | 19.19% | 26.76 | 1308 | 1:38 |
| 1988 | 94 | 7.20% | 19.15% | 26.35 | 1305 | 1:20 |
| 1984 | 145 | 10.73% | 19.31% | 30.04 | 1351 | 1:44 |
| 1983 | 81 | 6.14% | 27.16% | 33.30 | 1319 | 1:07 |
| 1982 | 103 | 8.01% | 24.27% | 32.28 | 1286 | 1:40 |
| 1980 | 112 | 8.02% | 19.64% | 27.66 | 1397 | 0:53 |
| 1979 | 246 | 18.10% | 14.23% | 32.33 | 1359 | 1:40 |
| 1977 | 203 | 15.53% | 17.24% | 32.77 | 1307 | 2:38 |
| 1971 | 252 | 19.70% | 21.03% | 40.73 | 1279 | 2:45 |
*Attendance Rates are calculated using the number of registered voters and peak attendance numbers.
**Real Democracy scores are calculated using attendance and participation numbers. For more infomation on them see the Data Overview Page
