The Parliament is the legislature of the Resurgent Dream. It is a unicameral body consisting of 364 members. Of these members, 339 are directly elected by the people of the various principalities and 25 are appointed by the governments of the principalities.

Parliament has the right to pass any law which does not contradict the Agwenian Edicts, in other words it is bound to respect certain rights reserved for the principalities and the people, as well as certain permanent institutions, most prominently the judiciary. Parliament can only exercise its legislative authority with the royal assent, although this has never been denied.

Parliament contains within itself the political executive. The leader of the plurality party in Parliament is normally given a mandate to form a government from the Crown, unless the high king has been made aware beforehand of a coalition led by a party other than the plurality party which nonetheless possesses a majority of total seats. Whoever receives the mandate must quickly form a government capable of receiving a vote of confidence from Parliament. If Parliament refuses to place confidence in the government or, if at any later point after having placed confidence in the government, Parliament passes a motion of no confidence, new elections must be held immediately.

History

In ancient times, Danaan monarchs paid for all the expenses of the Crown with the incomes of their own lands. They primarily relied for support not on their own armies but on the support of the feudal lords. However, during the reign of High Queen Corrina, the expenses of ruling grew to be too great for her income. Corrina insisted on maintaining a standing Army answerable only to her and capable of maintaining order and defending the nation. She also insisted on an increasingly centralized government and on more extensive diplomatic dealings.

To finance her activities, the High Queen decided to institute taxation. However, as this was not a traditional power of the Crown, even before constitutionalism, she felt the need to summon representatives of the people and request their money. The first Parliament, summoned in 1600, consisted of separate delegations from the Church of Dana, the nobility, and the common people. Its authority was solely limited to taxation. While Parliament had the right to be informed of how the Crown intended to spend tax funds, but after it was so informed had only the right to grant or refuse such funds. It had no power to determine how tax funds should be spent.

Gradually, over the centuries, Parliament merged into a single unicameral body whose membership was determined in a more and more democratic way. It also gradually expanded its powers to include more and more actual legislative authority. All of these changes culminated in the Agwenian Edicts, enacted by High Queen Agwene, which recognized Parliament as a modern democratic legislature, elected by universal suffrage.

Some critics continue to push for further Parliamentary reforms, charging that the existence of members appointed by their principality rather than elected and the disproportionate representation of the smaller principalities are both undemocratic. However, the accepted wisdom in the Resurgent Dream is that these features merely ensure that the interests of each principality are fairly represented so as to maintain the federal nature of the Danaan system.

Composition

The Danaan Parliament is composed of 364 members representing the twenty-five principalities. 339 of these members are elected by the people of their principality and the other 25 are appointed by their principality.

Popularly elected members of Parliament are divided proportionally among the principalities, always rounding up and thus guaranteeing even the smallest principality an elected member in Parliament. There are eleven principalities with only one elected member in Parliament. The largest principality, Shieldcrest, elects no fewer than eighty. Those principalities with the right to elect more than one member are divided into approximately equal districts, each of which is represented by one member. The governments of the principalities are entitled to decide the exact borders of these districts themselves. Preferential voting is used in Parliamentary elections.

Officers

The ministers of both the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet sit in Parliament. Cabinet ministers sit as chairs of the Standing Parliamentary Committees relating to their portfolios and their Shadow Cabinet counterparts sit as Vice-Chairs of the same committees. Because, under normal circumstances, a bill must pass in committee before it can be proposed in Parliament, these committee chair positions wield great influence.

The Speaker is elected by Parliament to control the course of debate and enforce the rules of parliamentary procedure. However, in doing so, the Speaker acts almost entirely on precedent and rules, consulting the Parliamentarian on the established procedure when the Speaker is unclear. This position is largely ceremonial and is usually given to a member of the governing party who has distinguished himself or herself in the past but is no longer heavily involved in the political process.

The Parliamentarian and the Secretary of Records are appointed by the Speaker and are never sitting members of Parliament. They are professionals who assist the Speaker and the Parliament by making expert knowledge on procedure available to him and recording the debate and proceedings of Parliament, respectively.

Women, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities

The Danaan system of electing Members of Parliament by principality, combined with the way ethnic and religious groups are dispersed over the various principalities, leads to greater diversity in the Danaan Parliament than exists in the nation at large. Religious and ethnic minorities heavily concentrated in some of the smaller principalities make up a greater proportion of Parliament than they do of the Danaan population at large. Religiously, the primary beneficiaries of this phenomenon are Muslims, Catholics, Shinto practicioners, Carasian Orthodox, and Jews. Racially, the primary beneficiaries are Arabs, Africans, and non-humans.

The Danaan electoral system is often criticized on the right for being undemocratic. However, defenders claim that the protection of the interests of the small principalities through this system is necessary both the the Danaan federal system and for liberal democracy in general. In the former case, this is because the principalities are governed not by administrators who wield authority delegated by the central government but instead by their own constitutional governments whose elected officials are responsible to the people of the principality and not the people of the nation as a whole. In the latter case, it is because liberal democracy not only follows the will of the majority but also ensures the rights of the minority.

Astute observers have noted that this situation seems to be the exact reverse of the debate about the unrepresentative nature of the Senate in the former United States. In that instance, critics on the left complained that the Senate was undemocratic because of the disproportionate representation of white Protestants in that body as compared to the total population, a phenomenon which resulted from the fact that Protestant white populations dominated in many rural states with small populations. A few cynics, noting this reversal, have suggested that political thinkers care not about constitutional ideals but about guaranteeing maximum representation for the population groups most likely to vote for them. Others dismiss this observation as resting on an unfounded comparison to a marginal political debate in a foreign and no longer existent country.

Unfortunately, this diversity in Parliament does not apply to women, who continue to make up only 20% of the Danaan Parliament, even as they make up a whopping 60% of the overall Danaan population, higher than almost any other nation. At present, there are 72 women sitting in Parliament, more than at any time in the nation's history.

Danaan law does not deny or restrict the right of any adult person to run on equal terms for the Parliamentary seat of the district wherein they reside on the basis of race, creed, sentient species, sexual preference, gender, or national origin. All Parliamentary elections are conducted on the basis of universal suffrage. The underrepresentation of women is the result, not of any rules created by men, but of the apparent preference of a predominantly female electorate for male candidates, a preference most Danaan feminists consider to be the result of past male oppression.

Restrictions on office holding

The Danaan Constitution prohibits Members of Parliament from simultaneously belonging to the Uasal Court. No Member of Parliament may hold any office of trust or responsibility under a foreign State or Sovereign, although they may carry a foreign noble title so long as continuing to bare such a title does not require any particular personal duties of them.

The reigning princes of the various principalities and their spouses may not serve in Parliament, although other members of the royal family are free to do so. It is expected that any Member of Parliament who might inherit the Throne of a Principality or Grand Duchy will immediately resign his seat. Any prince who failed to do so would forfeit his title.

There is nothing in the Danaan Constitution which prohibits Members of Parliament from also serving in the legislatures or even the governments of the principalities. However, the constitutions of most of the individual principalities prohibits it as does custom and the norms of political conduct.