The Emerging Morphology of the World's Legislatures

In recent years there has been quite a growth in the corpus of research on legislatures, so that today studies of the legislature are extant for about two dozen countries. Studies of Third-World representative assemblies have demonstrated a remarkable degree of “linkage” between legislators and constituents. Alongside research on European and Asian legislatures, these inquiries make possible a better understanding of the contributions of legislative institutions to political integration. More generally, the accumulating literature on legislatures permits the construction of functional typologies which are more empirically adequate than earlier ones.