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Upper house

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Legislature
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An upper house is one of two chambers of a bicameral legislature, the other chamber being the lower house.

Contents

Common characteristics

An upper house is usually distinct from the lower house in at least one of a number of ways. Upper houses are frequently:

Powers

It is the role of a revising chamber to scrutinise legislation that may have been drafted over-hastily in the lower house, and to suggest amendments that the lower house may nevertheless reject if it wishes to. An example: The British House of Lords, which under the Parliament Acts may not stop, but only delay bills. It is sometimes seen as having a special role of safeguarding the Constitution of the United Kingdom and important civil liberties against ill-considered change. By delaying but not vetoing legislation, an upper house may nevertheless defeat legislation: by giving the lower house the opportunity to reconsider, by preventing it from having sufficient time for a bill in the legislative schedule, or simply by embarrassing the other chamber into abandoning an unpopular measure.

Election or appointment

Many upper houses are not directly elected, but appointed: either by the head of government or in some other way. This is usually intended to produce a house of experts or otherwise distinguished citizens, who would not be returned in an election. For example, members of the Canadian Senate are appointed by the monarch on the direction of the prime minister. In these systems, the seats are sometimes hereditary, as was the case in the British House of Lords (until 1998), and the Japanese House of Peers (until this house was abolished in 1947).

However, it is also common that the upper house consist of delegates who are indirectly elected by state governments - for example, in the German Bundesrat and in the United States Senate until the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. In addition, the upper house of many nations is directly elected, but in different proportions to the lower house - for example, the Senates of Australia and the United States have a fixed number of elected representatives from each state, regardless of the population.

Abolition

Many jurisdictions, such as Denmark, Sweden, Venezuela, New Zealand, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and New Brunswick, once possessed upper houses but abolished them, to adopt unicameral systems. Newfoundland had a Legislative Council prior to joining Canada, as did Ontario when it was Upper Canada. Nebraska is the only state in the United States to have a unicameral legislature, which it achieved when it abolished its lower house in 1934. The Australian state of Queensland also once had a legislative council before abolishing it in 1922; at this time members of the Legislative Council (the formal name of the state parliament) were not elected by the citizenry and so the council was found to be undemocratic and thus unconstitutional. As this was a purely internal matter, all other Australian states continue to have bicameral systems.

Titles of upper houses

Common Terms

Unique titles

See also

 

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