Portugal's Parliament: An Organizational Analysis of Legislative Performance

This article evaluates the performance of the Portuguese national legislature, the Assembly of the Republic. Accepting the argument that parliamentary performance is related to the degree to which a legislature is institutionalized as a corporate body, the article seeks to determine whether there has been any such institutionalization of the Assembly since its inception nearly a decade ago. The data show it to have experienced not institutionalization but, rather, disinstitutionalization, decay, and breakdown. It is incapable of transforming the broader political conflicts of Portuguese society into workable public policy.