| This dissertation seeks to tie together three themes which have dominated progressive era historiography in recent years: state-building, the professionalization of reform, and changing patterns of mass participation in the civic arena. It traces the movement for public budget reform from its origins in New York City at the turn of the century to its culmination in the establishment of the federal Bureau of the Budget in 1921. Focusing on the development of the ideology and techniques of budget reform, it documents the complex interplay of institutional reform with popular conceptions of citizenship as mediated by a growing class of elite professionals.;Public budget reform shaped both political theory and popular perceptions about citizenship and the role of government in mass society. The movement was initially led by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, founded in 1906, by comparable bureaus later established in other cities across the country, and by the Institute for Government Research, which was established in 1916 and subsequently became the Brookings Institution.;At the local level, budget reformers developed sophisticated theories of budget reform for an expert audience and actively marketed a more accessible version of their program to a popular audience through massively attended exhibitions, lectures, pamphlets, and press coverage. Their work provided both the institutional structure to organize the rapid expansion of government and the ideological rationale to facilitate popular acquiescence in this expansion. At the national level, reformers articulated a new theory of presidential power that lodged responsibility for the federal bureaucracy firmly in the hands of the President. During the 1920s, the Bureau of the Budget established the administrative apparatus necessary for the President to exercise centralized control over the bureaucracy and so provided for the emergence of the modern managerial presidency. |
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