2025 Predictions for Democracy in Massachusetts
For democracy renovation in the New Year, transparency's the word.
On January 1, the Massachusetts Legislature rang in the New Year with a raft of pronouncements on its plans for 2025. It was a decidedly mixed bag for democracy renovation, pairing pro-transparency reform proposals with continued resistance to outside scrutiny.
With that news in mind, here are two hopeful predictions for Massachusetts's democracy in 2025: First, I think the pro-transparency chain reaction underway in Massachusetts will continue to accelerate. Second, I think that an increasingly public rift will emerge between the state and municipal governments over something called “Home Rule Petitions”—with the potential to force even more changes for legislative responsiveness.
Prediction 1: The transparency movement will continue to accelerate
As I wrote in my last post, I think that 2024's Ballot Question 1 (authorizing a performance audit of the Massachusetts legislature) signaled a super-majority appetite for greater transparency in government. In leading the campaign, Auditor Diana DiZoglio emphasized the Massachusetts Legislature’s dysfunction and lack of transparency. Voters—already concerned about the state’s direction on topics like housing, transportation, and education—responded with a 72% showing of support. In resisting the audit, the Legislature now clearly stands against public opinion.
On New Years Day, legislative leaders all but acknowledged that reality in proposing their pro-transparency changes for 2025. Reforms on the list included making committee votes open to the public (thereby eliminating a mechanism by which popular bills are often silently killed), requiring that all bills get such a vote in the first year of the two-year legislative session, conducting a “listening tour,” and even subjecting the Legislature to the Open Records Law.
Still, these developments should not be mistaken for a full change of legislative direction. If anything, the Legislature has already indicated limits to any embrace of transparency. Per the Herald’s Chris Van Buskirk, legislative leaders want to lengthen the time allowed for negotiating final compromise bills, effectively codifying 2024’s end-of-year rush to pass a flurry of bills with minimal time for deliberation or public consideration. Lots of good lawmaking got done in that effort, but the rushed process nonetheless left much on the table.
The Legislature’s top leaders, Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano, also both slammed the media for criticizing legislative dysfunction in 2024, and neither gave any indication that their Chamber would take a more conciliatory approach to DiZoglio’s audit. Though the law was supposed to go into effect no later than January 3, the Legislature’s books remain closed to the Auditor.
All that said, we should not lose sight of the magnitude of change that legislative leaders promised on January 1. Most proposed reforms would boost transparency, in some cases radically. Together, they mark the first follow-on victory from Question 1’s momentum; if they are implemented, they will constitute real progress. They also vindicate DiZoglio’s strategy of seeking a mandate at the ballot box. Moving forward, democracy renovators should build on this success by holding the Legislature accountable in more competitive elections.
In 2025, I expect exactly that to happen. To that end, my predictions are:
The Legislature will enact some, but not all, of the pro-transparency reforms announced on January 1st. We should celebrate when reforms are enacted—while expecting to call out delays or revisions.
Legislative efforts to limit the audit will largely succeed, and the audit will proceed in a highly constrained fashion after legal rulings. Legislative leaders will meanwhile continue bashing the press for critical coverage.
Auditor DiZoglio will press forward with a public campaign for greater transparency. That campaign will yield public pressure for legislative leaders to honor and expand on the commitments to reform that they made on New Years Day.
More legislators will respond to public opinion and push for more transparency from leadership. (There has already been some movement in this direction: While both Spilka and Mariano won easy reelections to lead their respective chambers, the only senator who did not vote for Spilka cited the Senate’s lack of "transparency.”)
The Massachusetts Republican Party will use the theme of legislative dysfunction as it continues rebuilding under improved leadership, and this strategy will yield some Republican victories even despite hardening partisanship.
The groundswell of public support for greater transparency and responsiveness will translate into a raft of candidates announcing challenges to incumbent state legislators as 2025 draws to a close.
Prediction 2: Home Rule will have its moment
My second prediction is also about legislative responsiveness, in this case specifically to municipal governments. Namely, I think that the Legislature's lack of responsiveness to something called "Home Rule Petitions" will fuel enough local displeasure to force a change in practice.
A “Home Rule Petition” is a request submitted to the Legislature by a municipality, by which the municipality seeks permission to change part of its governance structure. Massachusetts has a long tradition of "local control,” but cities and towns nonetheless often need this permission—common reasons include altering local election rules, granting more liquor licenses, or enacting new taxes. In 2004, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston published a report on “home rule” in Massachusetts. One key takeaway is that the Commonwealth’s delicate balance between state direction and local autonomy depends, in some part, on a certain level of legislative responsiveness to Home Rule Petitions.
Home Rule Petitions got some press as 2024 came to a close, when the State Senate killed a Boston petition to alter the city’s tax structure. Merits of that proposal aside, the Senate refused to even bring Boston’s petition to a vote. While Mayor Michelle Wu and several commentators decried the lack of deliberation, the result reflected a broad, recent pattern: the Legislature seems to have developed a practice of letting Home Rule Petitions die on the vine.
I am mostly familiar with this issue because I supported a number of towns' Home Rule Petitions to enact ranked choice voting (RCV) in local elections, none of which got a vote in 2024. These were all towns whose voters had endorsed RCV in the 2020 ballot question and who had approved the petitions through the methods their charter requires, including some by town-wide referendum. Many of the petitions were supported by the towns' election administration officials. And yet, here again, the petitions were all denied a public vote. There are many such examples of this trend.
My prediction is that this non-responsiveness to Home Rule Petitions will open a second front in the campaign for legislative transparency, with local leaders seizing the opportunity to demand a better hearing for their petitions. There has not yet been a unified effort to support Home Rule Petitions as such; I think we will see that change in 2025.