Legislatures

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

The legislature is the official rule-making body of a political system, as opposed to the institutions charged with applying the rules, or with judging those alleged to have broken them. There is an entirely erroneous tendency to equate legislatures with elected parliaments, but there is no theoretical reason why, even as an ideal, the legislative function should be carried out by such a body, unless a prior commitment has been made to democracy as the source of legitimate rule making. The essence of the distinction lies in the separation of powers, so that a non-democratic state might still have a legislative body.

Usually, however, it is an elected chamber, parliament or assembly which is referred to as a legislature, though the entities so identified, the US Congress or the British Houses of Parliament, for example, are not usually pure legislative bodies, having some residual control over the executive. As a vast amount of the material that serves to lay down binding and legally enforceable rules in any modern society does not originate in, and may hardly have been seen by the parliament or legislative body, but is instead created by the executive under relatively light legislative powers of overview, the distinction is rapidly losing an empirical referent. Some systems, notably Fifth Republic France and post-war Italy, provide directly for law-making by the executive—decrees rather than laws, with no legislative overview at all. Nevertheless, the idea of the legislative function, even when there is no single body that uniquely serves the function, is an important conceptual distinction.