A
legislature is a type of
deliberative assembly with the power to pass, amend and repeal
laws. The law created by a legislature is called
legislation or
statutory law. Legislatures are known by many names, the most common being
parliament and
congress, although these terms also have more specific meanings.
In
parliamentary systems of
government, the legislature is formally supreme and appoints a member from its house as the prime minister which acts as the
executive. In
separation of powers doctrine, the legislature in a
presidential system is considered a power branch which is coequal to and independent of the both the judiciary and the executive. In addition to
enacting laws, legislatures usually have exclusive authority to raise
taxes and adopt the
budget and other
money bills.
The primary components of a legislature are one or more
chambers or
houses: assemblies that
debate and
vote upon
bills. A legislature with only one house is called
unicameral. A
bicameral legislature possesses two separate chambers, usually described as an upper house and a lower house, which often differ in duties, powers, and the methods used for the selection of members. Much rarer have been
tricameral legislatures; the most recent existed in the waning years of
caucasian-minority rule in
South Africa.
In most parliamentary systems, the lower house is the more powerful house while the upper house is merely a chamber of advice or review. However, in presidential systems, the powers of the two houses are often similar or equal. In
federations, it is typical for the upper house to represent the component states; the same applies to the supranational legislature of the
European Union. For this purpose, the upper house may either contain the delegates of state governments, as is the case in the European Union and in
Germany and was the case in the
United States before 1913, or be elected according to a formula that grants equal representation to states with smaller populations, as is the case in
Australia and the modern United States.
Because members of legislatures usually sit together in a specific room to deliberate, seats in that room may be assigned exclusively to members of the legislature. In parliamentary language, the term
seat is sometimes used to mean that someone is a member of a legislature. For example, saying that a legislature has 100 "seats" means that there are 100 members of the legislature, and saying that someone is "contesting a seat" means they are trying to get elected as a member of the legislature. By extension, the term
seat is often used in less formal contexts to refer to an electoral district itself, as for example in the phrases "
safe seat" and "
marginal seat".
See also
