Legislature

A legislature (UK: /ˈlɛdʒɪslətʃər/, US: /-ˌleɪtʃər/) is a deliberative assembly that holds the legal authority to make law and exercise political oversight within a political entity such as a state, nation, or city. Legislatures are among the principal institutions of state, typically contrasted with the executive and judicial institutions. They may exist at different levels of governance—national, subnational (state, provincial, or regional), local, or supranational—such as the European Parliament.

In most political systems, the laws enacted by legislatures are referred to as primary legislation. Legislatures may also perform oversight, budgetary, and representative functions. Members of a legislature, called legislators, may be elected, indirectly chosen, or appointed, and legislatures may be unicameral, bicameral, or multicameral, depending on their constitutional design.

There are several types of legislatures, reflecting the different constitutional principles of power on which states are organized. These types illustrate how legislatures differ not only in structure and function, but also in their constitutional relationship to other state institutions and in the theories of sovereignty and power that underpin them. The most common types are parliaments, which operate under the fusion of powers between the executive and the legislature; congresses, which function under the separation of powers between independent branches of government—in these systems, the legislature is institutionally separate from the other branches and has limited means to influence their operations; and supreme state organs of power, found in communist states, which operated under the doctrine of unified power, centralizing executive, legislative, judicial and all other state powers in a supreme state organ of power, with subordinate organs carrying out delegated functions within a constitutionally defined division of labour among state organs.