BICAMERAL LEGISLATIVE IN REGIONAL/FEDERAL STATES

COMPARATIVE POLITICS ANALYSIS PAPER 1

LAURA RUIZ OLTRA - ID NUMBER 800289612

At present, approximately 167 out of the 195 countries existing are considered to
be democracies. A modern democracy is supposed to have 3 separate branches of
government - executive, legislative and judicial - even if in the beginning the legislative
and the executive used to operate as only one. Comparativist Arend Lijphart (1999)
suggested that we think of democracies on a continuum from “majoritarian” to
“consensus” ones1, being these last ones the most common. Consensus democracies
usually have multiparty executives, executive-legislative balance, bicameral legislatures
and rigid constitutions that are not easily amended. Among all those characteristics, we
will focus in explaining bicameral legislatures, and defending the importance of a n
upper legislative chamber in non-unitary governmental systems, and the
characteristics it should have to effectively facilitate the regions’ “holding
together”.

Bicameral legislatures may be one of two types, symmetric and asymmetric;

which means that they have or not have the same constitutional faculties to participate
in the legislative process and to control the executive power. Foremost among them are
the asymmetric ones.

Why did the framers of Spain, the UK or Germany’s Constitutions create a

bicameral legislature? There are two main reasons for that: 1. History and path
dependence and 2. Trying to “capture” and “represent” the difference. As mentioned
before, bicameralism is thought for non-unitary governmental systems, meaning from
regional systems to federal ones.

The United States, Germany, and other federal systems use a bicameral system
in order to ensure the representation of the interests of individual states and provinces,

1
Orvis, Stephen and Carol Ann Drogus. 2019. Introducing Comparative Politics: The Essentials.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Congressional Quarterly Press.
as well as the population of the country.2 Because even if bicameralism has obviously
cons, such as the time-consuming process of reviewing law projects in both chambers,
the more veto-potential of the legislature, the larger costs of the parliamentary activity
and the higher instability of the government - in my opinion it has way more advantages
to offer. Its purpose is to reconcile the different region’s interests and to make possible
the “holding together” of the different regions or states. I speak from experience when I
say that not having an adequate parliamentary representation of the different regions in
Spain has lead to serious problems, as are the Cataluña and País Vasco claims for
political independence, and the confrontation of the whole Spanish public opinion in two
well-defined sides.

In the experts’ words, the problem with the Spanish bicameralism is that it was
not well designed to actually be a chamber for sub-state regions representation,
because of the unorthodox Spanish decentralization process, which took place after the
Spanish Constitution had been approved.

My point here is that not only “any type of upper chamber” is needed to represent
the different states or regions in a federal/regional system, but that different types of
upper chambers (different weight in parliamentary activity, different functions or different
electoral system) will lead to very different outcomes.

To sum up, we could speculate that Cataluña and País Vasco demands for
independence may not have bear fruit having had a truly region-representative upper
legislative chamber. As in the US happens, bicameralism is supposed to provide an
effective arena for dialogue between the central Government and the different regions;
and not having it or having an ineffective upper chamber in decentralized states can
lead to severe political issues.

2
McCarty, N. and Cutrone, M., 2006. Does bicameralism matter?. The Oxford Handbook of Political
Economy. Oxford: Oxford.