Lawrence D Longley - Two Into One: The Politics and Processes of National Legislative Cameral Change

Series Editor
Peter Merkl

Two into One: The Politics and Processes of National Legislative Cameral Change, edited by Lawrence D. Longley and David M. Olson

The Rationality of Political Protest, Karl-Dieter Opp

Pathways to Power: Selecting Rulers in Pluralist Democracies, edited by Mattei Dogan

New Politics in Western Europe: The Rise and Success of Green Parties and Alternative Lists, edited by Ferdinand Mller-Rommel

Comparing Pluralist Democracies: Strains on Legitimacy, edited by Mattei Dogan

No Farewell to Arms? Military Disengagement from Politics in Africa and Latin America, Claude E. Welch, Jr.

Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone, edited by Enrique Baloyra

The Rise and Fall of Italian Terrorism, Leonard Weinberg and William Lee Eubank

The Politics and Processes of National Legislative Cameral Change

Edited by
Lawrence D. Longley and David M. Olson

With contributions by
David Arter
Keith Jackson
Bjrn von Sydow

Foreword by
Arend Lijphart

First published 1991 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Two into one : the politics and processes of national legislative cameral change / edited by Lawrence D. Longley and David M. Olson.
p. cm.(New directions in comparative politics)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8133-1188-8
1. Legislative bodiesNew Zealand. 2. Legislative bodiesDenmark. 3. Legislative bodiesSweden. I. Longley, Lawrence D. II. Olson, David M. III. Series.
JF541.T88 1991
328.3'9dc20

90-49967
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-21213-1 (hbk)

Arend Lijphart
University of California San Diego

This volume is an extremely valuable and welcome addition to the growing scholarly literature on democratic constitutional design. The so-called new institutionalism in political science--the recent rebirth of interest in the institutional aspects of politics--is based on the conviction that institutions do matter, that they are not merely weak and inconsequential superstructures dependent on a "truly" determinant socioeconomic, cultural, or other non-institutional base. For political engineers, and democratic political engineers in particular, this new approach means that different institutional forms, rules, and practices can have major consequences both for the degree of democracy in a democratic system and for the effective operation of the system. Legislatures should probably be regarded as the most important institutions in a democracy, and whether they are organized as unicameral or bicameral systems is the most important institutional variable on which they differ.

The above argument already constitutes a strong justification of the analysis of the shift from bicameralism to unicameralism--what this book's authors call cameral change. In addition, it seems to me, the study of the three cases in which these shifts occurred--Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden--is particularly valuable because these cases are crucially significant deviant cases in two respects. First, they are different in that a camera! shift did take place in these three countries in the post-World War II era whereas a similar change in either direction did not occur in any of the other twenty well-established democracies, that is, those countries that have been democratic without major interruption since the late 1940s. The shift took place in only 13 percent of this group of stable democracies over a long period of time. It is significant that the current serious debate about, and reasonably good prospects of, possible cameral changes in Eastern Europe--plus the actual shift to bicameralism in Poland--have been occurring in the beginning of what, we hope, will be a long period of stable democracy. If our hopes are fulfilled, this can be expected to be a much less adventurous era from the point of view of institutional innovation.

The second respect in which the Danish, New Zealand, and Swedish shifts to unicameralism are deviant cases is that these major institutional changes did take place in as many as three countries, whereas other major institutional shifts--in particular, changes from parliamentary to presidential systems or vice versa and changes from proportional representation to plurality electoral systems or vice versa--have not taken place in any of the twenty-three long-term democracies. France appears to be an exception in that both types of change occurred in the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic, but neither entailed a complete shift. Proportional representation was replaced by the two-ballot system (which, according to Duverger's Ride, is much more similar to proportional representation than to plurality in its impact on the party system

In yet another respect, the three cases of cameral change represent deviant cases--deviant cases which lost their deviance. As the coeditors point out in their introductory chapter, bicameralism tends to be found in the larger and more heterogeneous countries and unicameralism in relatively small and homogeneous countries. Since the three countries analyzed in this book fit the latter category, they should have unicameral legislatures and their adoption of unicameralism strengthens the proposition linking size and degree of societal homogeneity on the one hand and the cameral character of the legislature on the other.

In addition to this study's theoretical significance, it also has important policy implications that extend far beyond the three cases under investigation. One is that it is not entirely unrealistic to contemplate cameral changes even in well-established democracies; with regard to this type of institutional change, democracies appear to be somewhat less frozen than in most other institutional respects. Another is that, for both old and new democracies, it makes sense that small and relatively homogeneous countries move to unicameralism. Similarly, it makes sense for legislatures in larger and more heterogeneous democracies to stay or become bicameral; an especially strong case for bicameralism can be made when an upper house is designed to represent the states of a federation and/or distinct ethnic or other groups in a deeply divided society. Conversely, even in federal and/or divided countries, bicameralism makes little sense if the two houses are similarly constituted as a result of, for instance, similar methods of election. Italy and Belgium are examples at the national level, and most of the state legislatures in the United States, after the Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions of the 1960s, provide examples at the subnational level.