in which a specific decision not to deport an allegedly illegal immigrant had
been overruled by the House of Representatives using a congressional veto
provision written into the INS authorizing legislation. The ruling was that
once Congress had made a general grant of delegated authority, it had no
further right to interfere with its execution, unless it chose to invoke the full
regular legislative process. Further cases are needed fully to clarify the situation,
and Congress continued to pass legislation which contains legislative veto
provisions, in the hope that the rulings will not be effective in enforcing this
aspect of the separation of powers.
Legislatures
The legislature is the official rule-making body of a political system, as opposed
to the institutions charged with applying the rules, or with judging those
alleged to have broken them. There is an entirely erroneous tendency to equate
legislatures with electedparliaments, but there is no theoretical reason why,
even as an ideal, the legislative function should be carried out by such a body,
unless a prior commitment has been made to democracy as the source of
legitimate rule making. The essence of the distinction lies in theseparation of
powers, so that a non-democratic state might still have a legislative body.
Usually, however, it is an elected chamber, parliament orassemblywhich is
referred to as a legislature, though the entities so identified, the US Congress or
the British Houses of Parliament, for example, are not usually pure legislative
bodies, having some residual control over theexecutive. As a vast amount of
the material that serves to lay down binding and legally enforceable rules in any
modern society does not originate in, and may hardly have been seen by the
parliament or legislative body, but is instead created by the executive under
relatively light legislative powers of overview, the distinction is rapidly losing an
empirical referent. Some systems, notablyFifth RepublicFrance and post-
war Italy, provide directly for law-making by the executive—decreesrather
than laws, with no legislative overview at all. Nevertheless, the idea of the
legislative function, even when there is no single body that uniquely serves the
function, is an important conceptual distinction.
Legitimacy
Legitimacy is both a normative and an empirical concept in political science.
Normatively, to ask whether a political system is legitimate or not is to ask
whether the state, or government, is entitled to be obeyed. As such the idea of
legitimacy is connected with the legal concepts ofde jureandde factopower.
Whatever the accepted grounds ofpolitical obligationmay be, legitimacy
refers to these. Its more interesting application, however, may be in the
Legislatures