Does democracy need an upper house?
This Economist article tries to suggest the questions that the British government should answer as it considers reform of the House of Lords. Along the way, the editors describe what they see as the legitimate role for an upper house in a bicameral legislature.Could your students compare the roles played by upper houses in the legislatures they are studying? And how would your students evaluate the critiques in this article?
What the Lords are for
"WHEN pondering what a representative democracy should look like, one option the authors of America's Federalist Papers never entertained was to give eminent crime-writers a say in shaping the nation's laws. Yet that is what Britain's constitution currently allows: Ruth Rendell, creator of Chief Inspector Wexford, and P.D. James, who dreamt up Commander Adam Dalgliesh, are both members of the House of Lords. The place is not short of such quirks. Since there is no formal way of calling speakers, the chamber decides collectively who should take precedence, by hollering. And whereas in most bicameral systems the upper house has fewer members than the lower, the Lords outnumber the Commons by 746 members to 639. Many seldom show up."Yet for all that, the House of Lords is currently working better than it has for a long time...
"Most in the Commons support an upper chamber that is at least partially elected. The Conservatives have had a clear policy in favour of a largely elected upper house for the past five years, even if plenty of their MPs feel uneasy about it. Mr Straw prefers a mixture in which half of the peers would be elected and half appointed (some, as now, by political parties), which sounds like a mess. But plenty of thoughtful people (many of them in the Lords) are holding out for oligarchy...
"Such arguments were bolstered by a new poll by YouGov for the Hansard Society, a charity, which suggests the public do not want a second chamber dominated by political parties, a probable outcome were the Lords to be elected....
"Almost all big democracies have bicameral systems... But not all upper houses wield the same power. Some, like America's Senate and Germany's Bundesrat, have real clout and can prevent bad (or indeed good) laws from going beyond proposals. Others are there merely to advise, revise and slow down the whole lawmaking process...
"Powerful upper houses occur in federal states, and they are powerful because their senators are elected to represent a discrete interest. Since Britain is not federal, it is not clear whom the elected peers would be there to represent...
"If, instead of asking who should be there, the question posed is what the Lords are for, most MPs will answer that the house should remain a place 'of temporary rejecters and palpable alterers'... And only a few people on the Labour left think the thing should be scrapped altogether, which would at least be neat.
"Full democracy makes sense—but only if the role of the Lords changes. There seems little point in electing new ones, paying their salaries and providing them with offices, just so they can do what the unelected lot are already doing for free."
Labels: legislature, theory, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:42 PM
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