Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Passion, Protest, Or Just Plain Incivility?: Responding To Bad Behaviors In Public Meetings, Suzanne Mccorkle

Research and Reports

Bad behavior is not new, but the prevalence of incivility seems a rising tide in the public arena. Passionate outbursts at a public input meeting and planned protest to disrupt meetings are captured with increasing frequency on today’s omnipresent electronic media. The negative invective allowed/encouraged during political campaigns seems to carry over to public input meetings and other places intended for the measured, deliberative processes of governance. In the public forum, sometimes it is easy to discern the planned protest from the passionate outburst; sometimes it is not. When a theater group pretending to be audience members broke into song …