Legislatures are institutions of government that are directly elected to represent local districts and citizens. A legislature has several key functions: representing citizens, deliberating on public matters, legislating or passing bills into law, authorizing government expenditures, forming governments, and overseeing the executive. Legislatures have either one or two chambers and operate through committees where most lawmaking is done. Effective legislatures have appropriate powers, committed members, and resources to represent citizens, pass effective laws, and provide oversight of the government.

2. LEGISLATURES
Reported by : Reymond Autentico
II BSED Social Studies

3. Topic Outline
Legislature : An Overview
Functions
Structure
Members
Importance of Legislature in our Society

4. OBJECTIVES
To know what is legislatures

5. Legislature : An Overview
Legislatures are the institutions of government that are closest to the citizens,
since they are typically directly elected and are often responsible for
representing local districts, rather than – as is the case with executives the
entire country.
A legislature is a deliberative assembly with the authority to make laws for a
political entity such as a country or city.
Legislatures are representative bodies: they reflect the sentiments and opinions
of the citizens.’As the English political theorist John Locke observed.

6. Functions
Democratic legislatures have six major functions, ranging from
representation to oversight the balance varying from one
legislature to another. Hence while they all ‘represent’ in one
form or another, for example, they will have different roles in
the budgetary process, and parliamentary legislatures are more
critical to the making of governments than those in presidential
executives.

8. Representation
While this is undoubtedly the essence of the work of
legislatures, it is not always easy to judge whether, and how
well, that function is fulfilled. The meaning of representation
should be obvious, and yet political science has been unable to
develop a definition with which everyone can agree.

9. Deliberation
Many legislatures serve as a deliberative body, considering
public matters of national importance. The main contrast here is
between a debating legislature and committee-based legislature.
In the former, deliberation takes the form of general discussion
in the chamber, in what is sometimes known as a plenary
session, or a meeting of the whole.

10. Legislation
Legislatures are often alone in having the right to make laws,
the painstaking process for passing bills into law underlining the
importance attached to government by rules, rather than by
individuals. The procedure is explicitly deliberative, involving
several readings (debates) as the bill moves from the floor to
committee and back again.

12. Authorizing expenditure
This is one of the oldest functions of legislatures, and of the lower house in
particular. Its origins stem from the original purpose of European assemblies,
which was to review requests for funds from monarchs. But it has since in
many parliamentary democracies become nominal. What usually happens is
that the executive prepares the budget, which is then reported to the
legislature but rarely modified there. it must have the ability to amend the
budget (as opposed to simply being authorized to make cuts), an effective
committee system, enough time to consider the budget in detail, and access to
background information underlying the budget.

13. Making governments
Legislatures are a key part of government, in the sense not just
that they take care of government business but also that the
abilities of executives to govern depend in large part on the
political make-up of legislatures.

14. Oversight
The final function of legislatures is oversight (or scrutiny) of the
executive. In many countries, the oversight role has been
growing in significance and value in recent decades, helping
compensate for the down grading of the legislative and
expenditure functions of assemblies, and providing a new
direction to their work.

15. Structure
While the functions of legislatures (and the dynamics of those
functions) vary from one to another, on matters of structure the
options are more limited. First, almost every legislature has
either one or two chambers, the number being determined by a
combination of history and political need. Second, most
legislatures operate through specialist committees where much
of the work of law-making is actually done, with plenary
sessions playing only a formal role in the legislative process.

16. Chambers
For most countries, a single-chambered (or unicameral)
legislature is enough to represent the interests of the
population and to manage its responsibilities; hence
about 60 per cent of the world’s legislatures have just
one chamber (Inter-Parliamentary Union ).

18. In the case of bicameral legislatures, one is usually known as the first
(or lower) chamber and the other as the second (or upper) chamber.
Perhaps counter intuitively, the lower chamber is usually the bigger
and the more powerful; while some upper chambers have near-equal
powers with their lower partners, most are both smaller and weaker.
The lower chamber is almost always the originator of new proposals
for legislation (bills), with the second chamber playing the role of
taking a second look, and the lower chamber often has sole or
dominating control over budgetary matters.

19. The origins of the lower/upper designation are unclear,
but they probably trace back to the manner in which
the British Parliament was divided between aristocrats and
commoners, with the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal’ comprising
the more historic and exclusive ‘upper’ chamber.

20. Selection of the upper chamber
There is not much point in a bicameral legislature unless the two
chambers represent public interests differently; if they are the
same size, are elected in the same way, and have the same
powers, they will simply replicate one another. One means of
avoiding this duplication is to select the chambers in different
ways, to which end there are three main options: direct election,
indirect election, or appointment

23. Committees
Committees are the workhorses of effective legislatures, offering detailed examination of matters of national
interest, including executive and legislative proposals. A legislative committee is a small working group of
legislators, created to cope with the volume and detail of legislative business, particularly in larger and busier lower
chambers. Committees come in three different forms:
• Standing committees are permanent, and grouped by policy specialties; so there will usually be separate
committees dealing with foreign affairs, economic affairs, budgets, health, education, the environment, and so on.
They offer line-by-line examination of bills in their particular areas of policy responsibility.
• Select committees monitor the main executive departments or are set up temporarily to hold hearings on matters of
public concern.
• Conference committees reconcile differences in bicameral legislatures in the wording of bills.

24. Members
It is important to understand legislatures as institutions, but also
important to understand their members and how they go about
their work. The most important development in liberal
democracies has been the rise of the career politician: the
degree-educated legislator with limited experience outside
politics who expects politics to provide a full-time, fulfilling
profession.

25. Importance of Legislature
Legislatures (sometimes called parliament, senate or congress)
perform three key roles: representation of the people, passing
effective legislation, and oversight of government. To fulfil
these roles effectively, they must have appropriate powers,
committed members and adequate resources.
Legislative functions.