The paper uses the analytical categories of the Evolutional Institutionalism, which offer a wide range of methods to analyze the structure of social institutions in general. The National Assembly of the Gambia as a social institution can be described by undertaking a deep examination of its niche and its memetic burden systems. The memes, cultural patterns that develop in the historic process of the society, heavily determine the arrangement of social institutions like parliaments. Therefor the paper tries to figure out how the architecture of the parliament is shaped by investigating those memes. Another aim of the paper is to show that the president as the most resourceful and potent niche actor has the most influence on the parliament as it, according to a system theoretical view, has to perform certain functions to acquire those resources. This leads to inner institutional mechanisms that deliver the dependence of the president and that let the everyday work in the parliament differ from the goals that are proclaimed in the constitution. On the other hand this means that the parliament does fulfill certain functions in the political system, although these functions do not deliver democracy. In an evolutionary view the parliament still performs its survival in an authoritarian political system that just presents challenges that differ from a democratic system. This view, of course, can also present proposals what prevents the parliament to be stronger in a democratic way and which characteristics of its surrounding system should be reformed to minimize the deficits in the work of the parliament.
