Public sector budgeting in European accounting and public management journals: missing in action? A review

The budget has traditionally played a major role in public sector accounting and accountability systems, being a fundamental tool for authorizing, constraining and controlling expenditure, and consequently regulating the relationships between (i) the electorate and the legislature, (ii) the legislature and the executive, and (iii) the executive and the bureaucracy. Interestingly, moreover, public budgeting exhibits clear similarities (in terms of participants, phases, activities etc.) wherever it is practised. As a consequence, it has been the subject of deep attention in different academic fields. Our purpose is to (i) develop a literature review on public budgeting, with a focus on the approaches and methods through which public budgeting has been studied by European academic journals, and (ii) identify new ways forward for research. Three European public management journals and three European accounting journals are selected and papers on public budgeting published on the selected journals are collected through specific criteria and analyzed. An iterative approach is used to ensure consistency between search findings and the aims of our analysis. The analysis highlights some interesting patterns in the European literature on public budgeting. First, considering the well-established relevance of the topic, relatively little work has been published in Europe on public budgeting in the last thirty years. Second, papers on public budgeting appear to be significantly under-theorized. Third, European authors clearly prefer qualitative research to quantitative analyses. This reflects a specific interest in the evolutionary and contextual aspects of budgeting. Fourth, most studies focus on Anglo-Saxon countries. The analysis also suggests several avenues for future research agendas. First of all, budgeting does not appear to have played a central role in European public management and accounting research and, thus, more studies are required to close this gap. Secondly, more theoretically informed and methodologically sound qualitative research is required to gain a better understanding not only of budgeting reforms, but also of budgeting features and processes, in order to support the development of an explanatory theoretical framework for budgeting. Finally, more studies should be undertaken on continental Europe and developing countries, as well as on cross-country comparison