The Budgetary Process

Abstract

Abstract To help us understand better the challenges of legislative capacity and accountability within the three ideal-typical models of legislative assemblies developed in Chapter 1 (the members’ assembly, the leaders’ assembly, and the voters’ assembly), this chapter focuses on the role of legislative assemblies in the budgetary process. The primary objective is to explore current-day cross-national variation in legislative assemblies’ power of the purse. We expect an assembly’s budgetary capacity to be related to its purposes. A members’ assembly may use the budgetary process to seek rents or win personal votes for incumbent members (or at least the more influential ones), to the detriment of fiscal discipline. In contrast, a voters’ assembly and a leaders’ assembly will in different ways seek to overcome the collective action problems of budgeting for a large number of discrete local constituencies. Leaders’ assemblies will tend to pursue budgetary policies with broader sets of beneficiaries and preferably diffuse costs, falling mainly on the supporters of the political “outs.”