Unterstanding the Abundance of Constitutional Law in Austria

While most countries rely on a single constitutional document, Austria has over a thousand legal acts with constitutional rank and is therefore an extreme case internationally. In addition to the Federal Constitutional Law (Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz, B-VG), there are many other constitutional laws, constitutional provisions in ordinary legislation and constitutional provisions in state treaties. Austrian constitutional lawyers have been pursuing this policy since the 1950s: the Austrian federal constitution is said to be fragmented or a ruin and would be dismantled by the constitutional legislature due to arbitrariness in the regalia of constitutional provisions. The project investigates the political causes and consequences of this development and analyzes the framework conditions, political motives and majority- finding processes for enacting new constitutional provisions in Austria. The project examines the dynamics between the Constitutional Court and politics and whether new constitutional law serves to adapt to social changes or to anchor party interests. Finally, the project analyzes whether the large extent of constitutional law restricts the scope for political action, since a parliamentary two-thirds majority is required to amend these legal matters, which in the recent past was usually only achievable through (expensive) concessions to the opposition. In addition, it is being researched whether increased majority requirements in many policy areas favored the long continuation of the grand coalition. To this end, the project examines the dynamics between the formation of government coalitions and constitutional legislation and develops various instruments to measure the "constitutional freeze" of policy areas over time. The project combines three research strategies: (1) identifying the political motives for the initiation and decision-making of each constitutional process, (2) testing hypotheses about objective drivers of constitutional lawmaking using statistical analysis techniques, and (3) case studies on selected processes of constitutional lawmaking. This project breaks new scientific ground by focusing on all constitutional laws of post-war Austria and thus analyzes an internationally unique and extreme case. The project makes an original contribution to the understanding of Austrian politics since 1945 by systematically describing and explaining the political motives and the auto-dynamic, system-inherent driving factors for new constitutional legislation. The project provides measurable indicators for determining political immobility or for financially expensive negotiation processes for completing trivial legislative projects and thus provides evidence-based input to the debate on constitutional reform.