ABSTRACT
This chapter looks into the institutional characteristics of the Portuguese parliament, taking into special account the changes that have taken place since 1976. It is a chapter centring mainly on parliament’s formal structure. The aim is to explain parliament’s institutional framework in order to allow for a more integrated analysis of its activity in the subsequent chapters, as a thorough explanation is not available in the literature. The scarce literature that does exist on the Portuguese parliament has either a predominant legal perspective (and even in that case, there are no comprehensive studies of the parliament), or centres on parliamentary activity, neglecting the formal framework. In this context, Luís Sá’s text about the evolution and parliamentary organisation of the Assembleia da República represents a good (and the only) attempt. 1 However, Sá does not take into consideration the legal changes that have occurred since the first Rules of Procedure [RP] were published in 1976.
