The internal process of organisation of the legislature creates various sub-structures and bodies (committees, leadership bodies, directing boards, and so forth), defined as ‘mega-seats’ (Carroll et al., 2006). This paper examines the patterns of distribution of these structures in parliamentary democracies, using cross-sectional and cross-time party level original data from twelve countries, with four legislative sessions each. The theoretical argument proposes the use of Lijphart’s concept of concentration of power to create a consensual-majoritarian continuum in the accommodation of power within the legislature. For a matter of empirical tractability, I divide the legislature into two different realms - Government and Opposition - to analyse both intra and inter bloc distributional patterns. In both branches, the paper shows how parties use legislative ‘mega-seats’ for (a) distributive purposes, a purely office-seeking strategy to provide pork to the MPs and simply to get as much control as possibly of political structures, assuming that parties are first and foremost ambition-driven actors (Schlesinger, 1994); (b) policy purposes, as parties use legislative ‘mega-seats’ to control the outcome of policy-making purposes.
