Members
House of Representatives of Nigeria.
Legislatures are made up of individual members, known as legislators, who vote on proposed laws. A legislature usually contains a fixed number of legislators. Because legislatures usually meet in a specific room filled with seats for the legislators, this is often described as the number of “seats” it contains. For example, a legislature that has 100 “seats” has 100 members. By extension, an electoral district that elects a single legislator can also be described as a “seat”.
Chambers
The British House of Commons, its lower house
A legislature may debate and vote upon bills as a single unit, or it may be composed of multiple separate assemblies, called by various names including legislative chambers, debate chambers, and houses, which debate and vote separately and have distinct powers. A legislature which operates as a single unit is unicameral, one divided into two chambers is bicameral, and one divided into three chambers is tricameral.
The Congress of the Republic of Peru, the country’s national legislature, meets in the Legislative Palace in 2010.
In bicameral legislatures, one chamber is usually considered the upper house, while the other is considered the lower house. The two types are not rigidly different, but members of upper houses tend to be indirectly elected or appointed rather than directly elected, tend to be allocated by administrative divisions rather than by population, and tend to have longer terms than members of the lower house. In some systems, particularly parliamentary systems, the upper house has less power and tends to have a more advisory role, but in others, particularly presidential systems like Nigeria’s, the upper house has equal or even greater power.
The German Bundestag, its theoretical lower house.
In federations, the upper house typically represents the federation’s component states. This is a case with the supranational legislature of the European Union. The upper house may either contain the delegates of state governments – as in the European Union and in Germany and, before 1913, in the United States – or be elected according to a formula that grants equal representation to states with smaller populations, as is the case in Australia and the United States since 1913.
The Australian Senate, its upper house.
Tricameral legislatures are rare; the Massachusetts Governor’s Council still exists, but the most recent national example existed in the waning years of White-minority rule in South Africa. Tetracameral legislatures no longer exist, but they were previously used in Scandinavia.
Size
Legislatures vary widely in their size. Among national legislatures, China’s National People’s Congress is the largest with 2,980 members, while Vatican City’s Pontifical Commission is the smallest with 7. Neither legislature is democratically elected, with the National People’s Congress being indirectly elected, as well as this the National People’s Congress has little independent power.
Legislature size is a trade off between efficiency and representation; the smaller the legislature, the more efficiently it can operate, but the larger the legislature, the better it can represent the political diversity of its constituents. Comparative analysis of national legislatures has found that size of a country’s lower house tends to be proportional to the cube root of its population; that is, the size of the lower house tends to increase along with population, but much more slowly.
Structure of Nigeria’s Legislative Branch
Chambers of the Nigerian Senate.
The National Assembly of Nigeria has two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is presided over by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Recall that The House of Representatives is the lower house of Nigeria’s bicameral National Assembly while the Senate is the upper house.
The House of Representatives has 360 members, who are elected for four-year terms in single-seat constituencies. The Senate, which has 109 members, is presided over by the President of the Senate. 108 members are elected for four-year terms in 36 three-seat constituencies, which correspond to the country’s 36 states. One member is selected in the single-seat constituency of the federal capital.
The Senate is chaired by the President of the Nigerian Senate, the first of whom was Nnamdi Azikiwe, who stepped down from the job to become the first Head of State. The House is chaired by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. At any joint session of the Assembly, the President of the Senate presides and in his absence the Speaker of the House presides.ure, then the bill becomes law and can be enforced.
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[Attributions and Licenses]
“Legislature” by Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
” Federal Government of Nigeria” by Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
“House of Representatives (Nigeria)” by Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
This article is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.