Lower Chamber Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Legislative studies specialists argue that legislatures, in democratic settings, perform representative, legislative, and oversight functions. Of the three types of representative functions, the first is sociological. A parliament represents society because the social characteristics of parliamentary members resemble those of the population. Second, parliaments represent by being given a mandate to stand for and make decisions on behalf of the population. Third, parliaments represent by making decisions intended to promote the well-being of society. In addition to representative functions, parliaments also perform legislative, or lawmaking, functions as they have the power not only to discuss, amend, and approve government sponsored bills, but also generally have the power to introduce bills and initiate the lawmaking process. Finally, parliaments perform oversight functions by monitoring the implementation of government policies and programs.

Legislative scholars have noted that while legislatures perform these three functions regardless of whether the political system in which they operate is parliamentary or presidential, legislatures in parliamentary settings also perform a fourth function: that of making and breaking governments.

Legislatures differ from one another depending on the number of chambers. According to the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU), 60 percent of the world’s legislatures are unicameral, while the remaining 40 percent are bicameral. In bicameral settings, spatial metaphor is employed to distinguish between two chambers: lower and upper. The distinction between the two applies only in the context of bicameral legislatures. Lower chambers are always elective and, hence, closer to the people, whereas upper chambers have generally been more insulated from the population.

Lower chambers differ from upper chambers in three basic respects. First, lower chambers are, on average, much larger than upper chambers. The data provided by the IPU on seventy-five bicameral legislatures show that the average size of upper chambers is 92.6 seats, and they vary from a minimum of 11 seats in St. Lucia to a maximum of 732 seats in the British House of Lords. The average size of lower chambers is 228 seats, and they vary from a minimum of 15 seats in Grenada to a maximum of 646 seats in the British House of Commons.

Second, the average terms differ between lower and upper chambers. Terms in lower chambers are typically shorter than those of upper chambers. The IPU data reveal that lower chamber terms average a duration of 4.5 years, with a range from two years, as in the case of the U.S. House of Representatives, to six years, as in the case of both the Liberian and Yemeni houses of representatives. Upper chamber terms are longer. According to the IPU, the average term of upper chambers is 5.3 years and varies from a minimum of four years, which is the duration of the term in 25 percent of the upper chambers for which the IPU collected information, to a maximum of nine years, as in the case of the Liberian Senate and the Moroccan House of Councillors.

Third, legislative studies specialists have shown that lower chambers are usually more powerful than upper chambers, with the exception of those whose formal powers are equal to those of lower chambers (such as the Italian and the U.S. senates). For example, lower chambers usually have the power to override upper chambers’ vetoes. But lower chambers also have greater powers than upper chambers with regard to the making and breaking of governments. In bicameral systems in which the distribution of power across the two chambers is not symmetrical (such as in Australia, Austria, the French Fifth Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, and Spain), lower chambers have the power to affect the survival and the duration of the government by granting or revoking the confidence to the executive branch. Upper chambers do not have such power. These differences between lower and upper chambers exemplify how bicameral legislatures were institutionalized. Lower chambers were created as chambers of popular representation, while upper chambers were created, according to Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart,“to serve as a conservative brake on the more democratically elected ‘lower’ houses.”

Legislative oversight is one area in which the power differential between lower and upper chambers is remarkably less evident. In 2009, the IPU collaborated with the World Bank Institute to produce the Survey on Parliamentary Oversight. The survey’s eighty questions addressed such issues as chambers’ ability to oversee policy implementation, chambers’ role in the budget process, the use of motions, chambers’ ability to dismiss and impeach the executive, and the presence or absence of ethical regulations such as codes of conduct and disclosure rules.

The questionnaire asked respondents from the 120 chambers surveyed to indicate whether their legislatures had any of the oversight tools about which information was sought. All the lower chambers for which information was collected reported to have two or more tools; almost 90 percent of them had five tools or more and the lower chambers included in the sample had an average of 6.02 oversight tools—a value slightly higher than the average recorded, admittedly with a different survey questionnaire in 2001 and across both lower and upper chambers. These values are not much different, and are actually slightly lower, than the values registered in the upper chambers: all upper chambers had at least three oversight tools; 95 percent of them had at least five and upper chambers had an average of 6.55.

The evidence generated by this survey suggests that while it is true that lower chambers are larger, and traditionally more democratic, representative, and powerful in the government selection and in the policy and lawmaking processes than upper chambers, they are equally, if not less, powerful in terms of their formal capacity to exercise legislative oversight.

Bibliography:

Lijphart, Arend. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-six Countries. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1999.
Pelizzo, Riccardo, and Rick Stapenhurst. “Tools for Legislative Oversight: An Empirical Investigation.”World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3388, September 2004.
Sartori, Giovanni. “Parlamento.” In Elementi di Teoria Politica. Edited by Giovanni Sartori, 217–256. Bologna, Italy: Societa editrice il Mulino, 1987.

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