Fundamentals of Institutional Design: The Functions and Powers of Parliamentary Second Chambers

There is a powerful sense in which, if you have seen one parliamentary body, you have seen them all. Of course, there are many differences in detail – of constitutional form, organisation, rules, influence, habits, standards of appropriate conduct. Nevertheless, on a wide canvas representative assemblies around the world have much in common. They are collective decision-making bodies that follow long-standing, widely shared practices and procedures epitomised in the British Parliament and the United States Congress and replicated, with variations, in many countries. These two famous, even maternal, parliaments have metamorphosed in many ways over the centuries. Still, it seems likely that if Edmund Burke or William Pitt could be resurrected to visit today’s British House of Commons, or if Henry Clay could sit in today’s US House of Representatives, they would be at home. In 1999, parliaments remained in 178 countries, according to the tally kept by the International Parliamentary Union headquartered in Geneva; today (2000) the figure is 177. The family resemblance among these parliamentary entities is very marked. But, of course, there are differences in the institutional design and performance of parliaments, and these lie at the heart of parliamentary analysis. The upper houses of the world’s parliaments, most commonly called senates, have not been given much attention by scholars or commentators. 1