I.COMPARATIVE LAW, CONSTITUTIONS, POLITICS AND BUDGET SYSTEMS

laws. In Group 1 countries, since constitutions explicitly define the general roles of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, and the relationships between the executive and the legislature, any draft budget system law will of necessity be reviewed carefully by all players, including possibly the constitutional courts mandated to review statutes for constitutionality. Indeed in Group 1 countries, portions of laws or entire budget-related laws have been rejected (see footnote 9) or criticised10 by constitutional courts. Such farreaching reviews or legal challenges are non-existent in Group 2 countries, thereby making it is easier to adopt statutes, perhaps of a lower quality. The relative ease of adopting laws is also accentuated by the non-separation of the executive from the legislature.

4.2. Absence of norms for constitutions partly explains differences in budget system laws

Within Group 1 countries, constitutional provisions vary widely. There are no universal rules for the content of written constitutions. In general, the amount of detail in constitutions varies widely. For example, the number of articles in the Constitutions of France and Portugal are 89 and over 300 respectively.11 The size of the constitution is not necessarily a guide to the extent to which legal requirements for the budget system are embedded in the constitution.

Constitutions have been distinguished according to whether they are “normative” or “programmatic” (Denniger, 1988, p. 108). The former are constitutions that contain legal rules that can be executed directly. In contrast, programmatic constitutions are those where provisions are not selfexecuting. To implement non-executable constitutional provisions, a statute law is usually required. It could be postulated that the countries whose constitutions have an entire chapter on public finances (e.g. Finland and Germany) are more likely to be “normative”, since detail is provided in the constitution to ensure that provisions are executable. However, there does not appear to be a correlation between the extent to which the constitution contains provisions related to the budget system and the density of statutory law pertaining to national budgeting. For example, the constitutions of Norway and the United States have few constitutional provisions relating to the budget system, yet Norway has no statute regulating its national budget system, whereas the United States has adopted a multiplicity of budget-related laws. An avenue of further research would be to examine more systematically the relationship between predominately normative or predominately programmatic constitutions and the density of budget-related statutes.

Even the number of constitutional documents varies. Whereas for most countries, the constitution is a single written document, a few countries (e.g. Austria and Sweden) have several formal laws that constitute their written