Political Science approaches to legislatures.

Summary What is the distinctive contribution of political science to the study of legislative institutions? And what has the study of such entities brought to political research? This paper argues that the answer to these questions is twofold. First, students of legislatures have amply demonstrated that legislative institutions do matter for the daily lives of modern societies – a statement that, as established in a first section, was far from evident in classical studies of political regimes, systems or elites. Second, we argue that legislative studies have actively contributed to our understanding of institutional change and strategic behaviour, arguably two of the most crucial areas of inquiry in political science.