A comparison between three ideal types of parliamentary politics : representation, legislation and deliberation

Representative, legislative and deliberative assemblies are commonly called parliaments. The three types of assemblies share many procedures and practices, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union includes all three types among its members. Nonetheless, as ideal types in the Weberian sense, the three kinds of political assemblies do differ in their modes of acting and thinking politically. This article is a thought experiment to sketch the three ideal types by working out a number of key aspects of their distinctive political features. The political action that characterizes representative assemblies is pre-parliamentary elections, legislative assemblies are judged by their post-parliamentary results, while deliberative assemblies are characterized by their parliamentary debates pro et contra. Whereas the parliamentary studies of recent decades have largely concentrated on the representative and legislative aspects, this article focuses on parliamentary procedure and rhetoric, revaluating from this perspective the intra-parliamentary aspect of parliamentary deliberation.