What Is a Legislature’s Purpose?

Legislatures in modern democratic nation states are social arrangements in which individuals selected as representatives interact with each other and with professional lobbyists according to quite specific transactional modes, producing continually updated bodies of legislation. It is widely assumed that the purpose of such legislation is or should be to benefit the society to which it applies, at least on balance. But analysis of the epistemic limitations of legislators, studies of the potential for opportunism enabled by the types of transactions that take place within legislatures, and empirical documentation of so-called “government failure” create doubt as to the validity of that assumption, and raise the question of how such a social arrangement can not only survive but grow in its influence over society. It is suggested that better understanding of this phenomenon can be had if the assumption of purpose, inappropriate for a complex social arrangement in that it conflates systemic purposes with ones appropriate for individuals, is abandoned and the legislative system’s operation is examined in terms of the overall organization of the processes which take place within it