ABSTRACT
This special issue of The Journal of Legislative Studies focuses on the Brazilian Parliament's lower chamber, the Chamber of Deputies. Its core concern is with its representative role, in the way it articulates policy-making capacity and interaction between citizens and parliament. In this Introduction we outline an historical and systemic profile of the Brazilian parliament before presenting our analytical framework. Our theoretical framework makes use of Polsby's typology on Arena and Transformative legislatures, to situate our study of the wider representative role of the Chamber of Deputies. We finish by presenting the volume's substantive chapters.
