We may expect greater insight into the way the five parliaments operate, if we move on from the internal division of labour to the functional performance of legislatures. The latter is best gauged by the extent to which they fulfil the functions assigned to them by the scholarly literature. In his pioneering study on the English Constitution, Walter Bagehot named five such functions: elective function, expressive function, teaching function, informative function, and legislative function (Bagehot 1963). Since then the catalogue of parliamentary functions has been widely extended. Yet, it is neither desirable nor necessary here to go into all ramifications of this debate. As most authors, in one way or another, acknowledge that parliaments perform elective, legislative, oversight, and representative functions, we have decided to concentrate on these four core parliamentary functions. However, when referring to legislative functions we do not contend that the entire legislative process rests with parliament. But even though bills are predominantly formulated by the executive, parliaments still have a pivotal role in the deliberation, that is, the screening and amending of bills introduced by the executive. Moreover, closely related to policy deliberation is the power of parliaments to pass resolutions which, though not being binding for the executive and not becoming law, may help to popularize certain norms and may even exert pressure on the executive to take into account such norms for policy-making. We do not follow Mezey (1979, p. 48), who subsumed oversight functions under what he termed the policy-making functions of parliaments, suggesting that, by checking the efficacy of legislation, oversight is the last stage in the law-making process. This is a rather narrow concept of oversight which in our view should extend to a very general and broad supervision of executive departments and is thus a very important function in its own right.