Budgeting Democracy

There was a time when no government in the United States had a coherent budget system. Jonathan Kahn tells the story of how a small, energetic band of reformers waged a successful campaign in Progressive era America to introduce fundamentally new systems of public budgeting into hundreds of cities, every state, and ultimately the federal government. It is a story that has remarkable resonances today.

Kahn suggests that budget reform altered understandings of citizenship and political accountability while facilitating a conceptual leap from seeing government as a random agglomeration of administrative fiefdoms to envisioning a coherent, interrelated, and unitary state.