Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the city council meetings of a northeast Ohio city government. Drawing on grounded theory, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, the paper investigates the participants of the council meetings and the roles they occupy, the kinds of discourse practiced, and the extent of participation in the discourse. The results demonstrate the potential for citizen participation in city government due to citizen access to the council meetings, solicitation of citizen participation, and citizen allotment of designated times to participate in the meetings. However, the findings also demonstrate that the role citizens played, the discourse they used, and the extent of their participation was disproportionate to that of government officials and was significantly limited in both size and scope.