Democracies can be unicameral or bicameral. With an unicameral system, there is only one chamber which uses some proportional system (usually) and represents the electorate as a whole.
With a bicameral system, there is a Lower Chamber (House of representatives, Congress of Deputies, National assembly, Parliament… it’s called differently in every country) and a Higher Chamber (usually called “Senate”). In most cases, the LC it’s supposed to represent people while the HV works as a territorial representation chamber.
In Spain, the Congress of Deputies is the LC, which by far more powerful than the Senate. The Senate is elected by a FPTP system, while the Congress is chosen by proportional representation.
Congress is the most powerful chamber: it elects the PM and creates laws, while the Senate can’t even propose legislation. It just amends the drafts sent from the Congress.
Most people don’t even know what the Senate does, and in fact, practically all functions of the Senate are done by the Congress too. Some laws are supposed to be approved by both chambers (the Budget, for example), but since the election system of the Senate benefits large parties, the largest party of the Congress always has an even larger majority in the Senate, so in most cases the Senate ends up being completely irrelevant. Actually, it only has one (1) exclusive function, suspending a region’s autonomy, which has only happened once.
Some have proposed to reform the Senate or even remove it and have an unicameral system. There is even a running joke of it being the “retirement chamber”: many politicians who are “politically dead” end there.
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We do have two chambers: the National Council (German: Nationalrat) and the State Council (German: Ständerat).
Both councils can propose laws, but for a law to pass both councils must vote in favor of it. A law can be passed back and forth a maximum of three times before it is definitely rejected. So eg. the National Council writes and passes a law, it’s then the State Councils turn to vote on it, they reject it. The law then goes back to the National Council who can adapt it, pass it again etc.
The State Council is largely seen as the body responsible for political stability – it’s job is to be liberal when the National Council is conservative and conservative when the National Council is liberal etc. The State Council is the more prestigious one and you have to be seen as a very respectable politician to be elected into it, to be voted out of the State Council is possible and not completely unheard of, but it’s rare. At least much more rare than the same thing happening in the National Council.
We have one chamber (Folketinget). We used to have another (Landstinget) but it was abolished in 1953. It was rather undemocratic as politicians had to have a certain amount of wealth in order to be part of Landstinget, so it was basically just a rich version of Folketinget. A way for the elite to get a second go at veto’ing or passing a law.
Which is obviously unfair. I believe initial attempts at removing it were made in the late 1800s but it was obviously vetoed by the Landsting each time. But campaigning for it continued until 1953 where i guess even the elite had come around to see that it wasn’t fair.
The first chamber ( which would be the senate ) is elected by the people elected to the provincial elections.
The second chamber is proportionally elected in the national elections.
There are parties that want to get rid of the first chamber , people often pretend like they’re checking the laws from the second chamber on constitutionality but really it’s just a less active second chamber with a whole lot of people who are in a bunch of boards of directors on the down time and won’t even requse themselves when there’s a conflict of interest.
We have two – our upper chamber is unelected and includes both bishops and a small selection of hereditary peers (edit – people from aristocratic families with titles, who actually do have limited elections), but most of the members are either ex-elected politicians, people who supposedly did a lot in some field or other or activism, or people who entirely coincidentally made a lot of donations to the right beneficiaries. The current idea is for a secondary look at legislation without the pressure of facing election/selection, and return to lower house, but many of them just show up for the free money and subsidised food/drink.
One chamber. Unicameral gang.
We had a 2 chambers before the reform in.. 1973? Early 1970’s something cant remember exactly. Or maybe that’s when we went from 3 year terms to 4 years? Maybe they both came at the same time
We just had 2 elections, both chambers had to agree over who was to be in government.
Well the first chamber was indirectly elected while the 2nd chamber was directly elected. So our form of regions elected their representatives to the 1st chamber while the 2nd chamber had a regular proportional system. You had elections to elect the government over the regions and they if I understood correctly then elected the representatives for the region in the 1st chamber.
1st chamber had 8 year terms, both chambers had the same powers which is like.. Kinda weird? As a party could be in majority in one chamber and minority in the other so the power play between the two could be problematic. But wiki does say:
>If the two chambers made conflicting decisions on budgetary matters, a joint meeting was convened to take a “joint” decision on such matters. In other matters, the question fell, but could be raised again by submitting a new proposal.
>However, the reconciliation was facilitated in Sweden by the fact that the Riksdag had joint committees for both chambers. This is rare for a two-chamber system; in fact, in bicameral systems, there are usually only temporary joint mediation committees or the like to resolve a dispute between the chambers. This is the case, for example, in Germany. In the UK there are joint committees.
In Germany, we have two chambers. The Bundestag (parliament) is in charge of coming up with new laws and voting on them. Then they are passed on to the “upper” chamber (it doesn’t really have a higher standing than parliament), called the Bundesrat. If they disagree with it, the Bundestag basically has to do a redraft and try again. Actually, it’s a little more complicated and there’s a lot more party politics and exchange between the two chambers happening.
The Bundesrat is composed of the representatives of all the 16 state governments, so they’re only elected indirectly through the state elections. Most of the time, the Bundesrat will accept whatever the Bundestag has agreed on, since the government coalition parties often manage to get a majority in most of the states (Bundesländer) as well.
I wouldn’t really change it, since the Bundesrat is good for stopping legislation that sounds good on a federal level, but that would be hard or impossible to actually carry out by the state administrations. It’s almost always about administrative affairs.
We have two chambers, the Chamber of Deputies (lower house) and the Senate (upper house).
Both chambers have the same powers, they can both present bills, amend them, and both chambers have to approve a bill in the same form for it to become law.
They both give confidence to the government and if the government loses a confidence vote in any of the two it has to resign.
The only differences are:
* Deputies have to be minimum 25 years old and Senators have to be at least 40 years old;
* the Chamber of Deputies is elected nationally, while the Senate is elected on a regional basis. This doesn’t mean much, since the constitution states that both Deputies and Senators “represent the nation” (so Senators don’t represent the region they are elected in, but the whole country), and since there is no link at all between where you live and where you can be elected (for example, Matteo Salvini, living in Milan, was elected in Calabria);
* the President of the Republic can appoint at most 5 Senators for life on a merit basis, and every former President is Senator for life
Until the last election included, only people older than 25 could vote for the Senate, but starting from the next elections everybody older than 18 will be able to vote for both.
The electoral system has always been the same for both chambers, applied nationwide in the Chamber of Deputies and regionally in the Senate. This is not an issue currently (3/8 of the seats are assigned with FPTP in both houses, with the rest being PR), and has never been an issue in the past, apart from the three elections in which the majority bonus was used: the bonus was applied nationally in the Chamber of Deputies (assigning 54% of seats to the first coalition) and regionally in the Senate (assigning 54% of seats *in each region* to the largest coalition *in the region*), and that created a huge risk of a coalition having a comfortable (fake) majority only in the Chamber of Deputies.
We have two chambers, the House of Commons which is the lower house, and the House of Lords which is the upper house.
The House of Commons consists of 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) who represent a specific subdivision of the country known as a *constituency* (the American equivalent would be ‘district’ while I think in Canada they’re called ‘ridings’) and who are elected directly to parliament by said citizens of their constituency. One of those elected MPs will be the Prime Minister, so in effect only the residents of Boris Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge can vote him out directly, while everyone else would have to vote him out simply by electing enough MPs of the opposing party to power. Another MP is what’s known as the Speaker, whose role is essentially to maintain order in Parliament and to table motions. The Speaker has to be neutral and cannot be the member of any party, much to the chagrin of the residents of the Speaker’s constituency since most of the major parties usually agree not to run candidates against the Speaker, and so residents of the Speaker’s constituency only have the choice of either re-electing the Speaker or choosing some fringe party. Finally, you have a few MPs from Sinn Fein, an Irish party active in Northern Ireland, who don’t take their seats in Parliament as they believe British sovereignty over NI is illegitimate.
The House of Lords is unelected and consists of a number of people (‘peers’) appointed by the PM based on a combination of merit, mutual backscratching and other more corrupt practices, as well as a number of hereditary peers. Members of the House of Lords are usually addressed by their title, eg. Baroness Thatcher or Lord Webber. On the flipside, it also has little power other than to temporarily block bills, if a bill passes the House of Commons after a third reading the House of Lords cannot block it. If I’m not mistaken though, the House of Lords tends to be quite poorly attended and a lot of the Lords are very old so it’s quite common to see people asleep, I mean apart from when it comes to bills that would raise their taxes of course.
Abolishing the House of Lords is a very common point of discussion among the left, or at the very least abolishing hereditary peers.
Finland’s parliament is unicameral and seems very simple compared with many other countries. The parliament has always been unicameral but its predecessor, [The Diet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Finland) sort of had four chambers for the four estates. The Estates were Nobility, Clergy, Bourgeoisie and Peasants (meaning land-owning farmers). That system was ended in 1907 and the number of people who could vote (including women and men who weren’t included in the estates) increased tenfold.
Adding to OP’s info, Spain’s parliamentary system is bicameral on the national level, but unicameral on the regional one.
Luxembourg got a chamber. It’s our primary legislative body and functions as a regular parliament. Luxembourg’s chamber has 60 seats and is voted in a regionalised proportional system. There are four regions and the seats are proportional to the regions population. The North, though being the largest region therefore only got six seats. Elections are every five years and ballots are quite complicated as you can cast a vote in two completely seperate ways. You can either vote for one party or you can vote for their candidates instead of the party. You can vote for multiple parties that way, and can cast two votes for a specific politician. Choosing this method you can cast as many votes as candidates are listed by the party in your region.
If I could change anything I’d remove the regional separation. It is meant to guarantee the representation of regional Interest but make the system over all less proportional. I don’t consider the rounding error worth it seen the size of Luxembourg. Living in the North I don’t see much issues exclusive to the region while I’m unable to contribute to smaller parties results as my vote only matter for regionally while national results are pretty much ignored.
Our upper house is called the House of Lords, and it’s a mix of life peers appointed by the Prime Minister, 90 (the other two are ceremonial and don’t ever actually attend) hereditary peers who get elected by other hereditary peers to a seat there, and the most senior bishops of the Church of England who have seats ex officio. Reform of the House of Lords is subject to some of the strongest inertia in all of British constitutional politics, because it’s very thoroughly subordinated to the elected House of Commons in both power and legitimacy.
The left would see it abolished or elected (which imo would be a stupid idea) on principle, but nobody who has any power can be arsed to do more than tinker, in spite of the occasional fusses that get kicked up by the right when the Lords do something nice (which happens quite often) or the left when they do something nasty (which is markedly rarer). The central problem with Lords reform, in truth, is that the Lords are actually the saner and more humane House of Parliament by some margin: while the Commons inches ever closer to fascism, Tory dictatorship, and outright murdering the poor, the Lords can be counted on to show liberal decency in its votes on legislation. Those votes never go anywhere, because the Commons rarely has to invoke the Parliament Acts to get its way, but I know which House I’d rather have been governed by these last twelve years…
The Portuguese system is unicameral, with representatives being elected in circles corresponding to districts (a type of administrative division that nowadays is used almost solely for this purpose) using the D’Hondt method.
Austria has a bicameral system. The Nationalrat is elected proportionally every five years. The second chamber, the Bundesrat has almost no power. It can veto laws but the Nationalrat can reject the veto with a simple majority vote. The members of the Bundesrat are sent by our nine states proportional to the population of each state.