Assembly

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An assembly is a collection of people who either directly comprise, or represent, a political or social entity. The common example of a school assembly helps to explain the concept. In this case the entire body of people, pupils and staff, who make up the social group of the school, assemble together to discuss or to hear rules, information or instructions. In a political sense assemblies are decision-making or rule-passing groups. In many cases there is no real difference between an assembly and a parliament, house of representatives, chamber of deputies, or whatever the local terminology of the political system may be.

Whereas the terms parliament and congress can be used to refer to both houses of a bicameral system, although the meaning is more often the lower chamber which does most of the legislative work, assembly always means just the lower chamber or the single chamber in a unicameral system (see second chamber).

There remains a shade of difference in the implication, however. Because a full assembly (as in the school example) implies that all relevant people are present, calling some body an assembly implies less a meeting of representatives, perhaps with freedom of action, than a direct collection of all parties. In the United Nations, for example, the General Assembly contains all the member states, in contrast to the Security Council which has only a few members. The authority of an assembly is accordingly greater than that of a council or set of representatives. The example of the French National Assembly is to the point: the theory of direct representation of the will of the people, which permeates French democratic thought from Rousseau onwards, leads to a preference for thinking that elected members somehow stand in for the physical impossibility of collecting the whole population of France into a true general assembly.

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