Investigating the determinants of parliament size in the ‎balance of efficiency and representation (comparative ‎study)‎

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of Public Law, Faculty Humanities Sciences, Bou Ali Sina University, Hamadan, Iran‎

Abstract

The Parliament is an example of a society in which the determinants of its size have been less studied. The present article hypothesizes that determining the number of seats in a legislature is a balance between efficiency and representation. One of the important components to achieve the desired efficiency is to have enough people with the necessary expertise to perform the tasks. In case of shortage of personnel and consequently, lack of necessary specializations, the group will certainly not achieve the desired efficiency. Also, the larger the group, the greater the proportion of votes to the number of seats, parties, and representatives of the smaller groups. Based on this, the current research tries to investigate with a scientific-analytical approach through the demographic statistics of the parliaments of different countries, what is the relationship between the number of parliamentarians and the efficiency and representation of that parliament? Also, with a secondary question, after comparing the conditions of the Islamic Council of Iran with other countries in this category, it is tried to check whether the requirement of the two important duties of legislation and supervision (based on principles 71 and 76 of the constitution) with this Hasn't the number of representatives caused excessive use of Article 85 of the Constitution? According to the results, Iran's parliament ranks 236 among the 239 parliaments in the world in terms of the number of representatives. This issue can have a great impact on the efficiency of the parliament and also on the matter of representation.

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References

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Comparative Law Review
Volume 14, Issue 1
Spring & Summer 2023
July 2023
Pages 491-512

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