Legislature

A legislature is a with the  to make  for a  such as a  or. Legislatures form important parts of most ; in the model, they are often contrasted with the  and  branches of government.

Laws enacted by legislatures are known as. Legislatures observe and steer governing actions and usually have exclusive authority to amend the or budgets involved in the process.

The members of a legislature are called s. In a, legislators are most commonly popularly , although and appointment by the executive are also used, particularly for  legislatures featuring an.

Terminology
Names for national include "", "", "", and "", depending on country.

Internal organization
Each chamber of the legislature consists of a number of legislators who use some form of to debate political issues and vote on proposed legislation. There must be a certain number of legislators present to carry out these activities; this is called a.

Some of the responsibilities of a legislature, such as giving first consideration to newly proposed legislation, are usually delegated to s made up of a few of the members of the chamber(s).

The members of a legislature usually represent different ; the members from each party generally meet as a to organize their internal affairs.

Power
Legislatures vary widely in the amount of  they wield, compared to other political players such as, , and. In 2009, political scientists and Matthew Kroenig constructed a Parliamentary Powers Index in an attempt to quantify the different degrees of power among national legislatures. The German, the , and the Mongolian tied for most powerful, while Myanmar's  and Somalia's  (since replaced by the ) tied for least powerful.

Some political systems follow the principle of, which holds that the legislature is the supreme branch of government and cannot be bound by other institutions, such as the judicial branch or a written. Such a system renders the legislature more powerful.

In and  systems of, the  is responsible to the legislature, which may remove it with a. On the other hand, according to the doctrine, the legislature in a  is considered an independent and coequal branch of government along with both the  and the executive.

Legislatures will sometimes delegate their legislative power to or.

Members
Legislatures are made up of individual members, known as, who on proposed laws. A legislature usually contains a fixed number of legislators; because legislatures usually meet in a specific room filled with seats for the legislators, this is often described as the number of "seats" it contains. For example, a legislature that has 100 "seats" has 100 members. By extension, an that elects a single legislator can also be described as a "seat", as, for, example, in the phrases "" and "".

Chambers
A legislature may and  upon s as a single unit, or it may be composed of multiple separate, called by various names including , , and houses, which debate and vote separately and have distinct powers. A legislature which operates as a single unit is, one divided into two chambers is , and one divided into three chambers is.

In bicameral legislatures, one chamber is usually considered the, while the other is considered the. The two types are not rigidly different, but members of upper houses tend to be indirectly elected or appointed rather than directly elected, tend to be allocated by rather than by population, and tend to have longer terms than members of the lower house. In some systems, particularly, the upper house has less power and tends to have a more advisory role, but in others, particularly , the upper house has equal or even greater power.

In s, the upper house typically represents the federation's component states. This is a case with the supranational legislature of the. The upper house may either contain the delegates of state governments – as in the European Union and in and,  – or be elected according to a formula that grants equal representation to states with smaller populations, as is the case in  and the United States since 1913.

legislatures are rare; the still exists, but the most recent national example existed in the waning years of White-minority rule in. legislatures no longer exist, but they were previously used in Scandinavia.

Size
Legislatures vary widely in their size. Among, 's is the largest with 2,980 members, while 's  is the smallest with 7. Neither legislature is democratically elected: The Pontifical Commission members are appointed by the Pope and the is.

Legislature size is a trade off between efficiency and representation; the smaller the legislature, the more efficiently it can operate, but the larger the legislature, the better it can represent the political diversity of its constituents. Comparative analysis of national legislatures has found that size of a country's tends to be proportional to the  of its ; that is, the size of the lower house tends to increase along with population, but much more slowly.