| Summary: | Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. === The citizens of the United States are proud of their country and cherish their right to vote as they feel best suits the needs of their country. Under the American Constitution, the American citizen has the privilege to vote for candidates and on questions concerning the whole country, his native state, and his home town or city. The municipality was the foundation upon which our state and nation was built, A foundation which must not be allowed to decay. One of the best methods of guarding against the decay of the foundation of his system of government is to keep him continually informed as to the activities of his local government. Among the many vehicles of information, one of the best is the annual municipal report. This report, which appears annually, should contain the necessary information from which the local citizen may discover the degree of success with which his government served him during the past year. The greater majority of annual reports have not been meeting this purpose. Too many are products of obligations rather than highways of information.
This problem was regarded as sufficiently important to warrant an extensive study of municipal annual reporting. The purpose of the study was to comment on this decadence of the present reporting in the greater number of cases, pick out specific instances of deterioration, and finally, in a selected number of departmental reports to illustrate hy example what type of reporting will succeed in disseminating briefly and clearly the necessary information required by an alert citizenry. The scope of such a study, covering as it would the entire United States, was much too broad in its entirety and necessarily required restriction within a definite area. The area selected was the state of Massachusetts. Even this area was necessarily limited to 62 towns and cities selected through an intricate process based on time, geography, and population.
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