more or less forced – and bound by long-standing convention – to appoint as chancellor whichever majority leader the legislature will preselect. The National Council, on the other hand, is rudderless without guidance from a functioning cabinet, to the point that it will readily dissolve itself if the ruling coalition breaks down and no other coalition emerges to replace it. Provincial governors and their cabinets are elected by provincial parliaments. In seven out of nine provinces, the composition of the cabinet is in fact required by law to reflect the proportional strength of the parties in the legislature. In some parts of Austria, mayors are chosen by direct popular election. In most of the country, however, mayors are elected by city councils. City councils are not parliaments in so far as they do not enact statutes, but they do issue ordinances (), a form of secondary legislation, and pass budgets. In a system like this, the way to prevent any one executive official or committee from becoming too powerful is a separation of powers the executive. The Austrian constitution thus divides the set of administrative decisions that have to be made into numerous disjoint subsets such that ultimate responsibility for different subsets lies with different persons or institutions. A person or institution with ultimate responsibility for some class of administrative decision is a supreme executive organ. Terminology The German word "" in the sense of a person or committee acting on behalf of an institution is usually rendered as "body" by professional legal translators, including in cases where the "body" consists of a single individual. This is done partly for stylistic reasons and partly to avoid ambiguity; the English "organ" is occasionally used as a synonym for "branch of government". Publications specifically about constitutional and administrative law, however, have historically preferred "organ". Description The Austrian constitution uses the term "supreme executive organ" multiple times but provides neither an intensional nor an extensional definition. Article 19 of the Federal Constitutional Law contains what appears to be a taxative enumeration of supreme executive organs, but this list is universally dismissed as specious and useless. The defining characteristics of supreme executive organs and the consequences of membership to the class have been established by case law and academic scholarship. General characteristics A supreme organ does not take orders () from any other part of the executive branch and cannot be overruled by any