In a new blog for our Parliament Overviews series, Florencia Corbelle introduces the Argentinian National Congress.
Category: Overview of Parliaments
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The Parliament of Canada
As part of our Parliament Overviews, Gregory Veevers, an MA student in Politics at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, discusses the Parliament of Canada.
PSA Parliaments member, Julia Schwanholz of University of Goettingen, provides an overview of the German Bundestag as part of our Parliament Overviews series.
By Hilmar Rommetvedt
In his seminal article on ‘numerical democracy and corporate pluralism’ published in the 1960s, Stein Rokkan claimed that ‘votes count, but resources decide’. Important political decisions were not made in the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, but at the negotiating table where civil servants met with representatives of organized interests. For decades to come, most Norwegian observers subscribed to the ‘decline of legislatures’ put forward by Lord Bryce. However, today we may speak of a revival of the Norwegian Parliament. For since the 1970s, the Storting has become a more active, less predictable and more influential political institution.
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The current Czech Parliament arose from its predecessor established after 1968 when reforms towards federalization were undertaken in former Czechoslovakia. The Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, has existed since 1993. In 1996, senators of the upper chamber gathered for the first time. Institutionally speaking, the emergence of the Czech Parliament was much more complex since the members of the Chamber of Deputies in the first electoral period (1993 onwards) had been elected in the general elections in 1992. The 1992 general elections were held to elect members of the Czech National Council – a state-level parliament of the Czech Republic, which was a part of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, a predecessor of the current Czech Republic – and members of the Federal Assembly. With the split of the former federation, only the state-level deputies retained their mandates. The Czech parliament therefore started as an “unimportant” state-level chamber of second-order deputies because many party leaders were present in the Federal Assembly which was seen to be much more important.
By Ernest Darfour
Ghana (or the Gold Coast at the time), established its first semblance of a Parliament (Legislative Council) in 1850 with representatives appointed by the British colonial government. The Legislative Council consisted of the Governor and at least two other person appointed by the colonial administration. The Legislative Council was required to make laws and ordinances necessary for the peace, order and governance of the Gold Coast. The legislature at the time was merely an advisory body and had no oversight power over the colonial government. Various agitations against the colonial authorities for equal representation and universal suffrage led to the transformation of the non-elected legislature into an elected Legislative Assembly in 1954.
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The Northern Ireland Assembly is the devolved legislature in Northern Ireland. The current Assembly was first constituted in 1998. This followed the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA), signed in April of that year.
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The Irish Parliament, the Oireachtas (pronounced irr-okh-tuss), is a bicameral legislature consisting of a 166-seat directly elected Lower House, Dáil Éireann (pronounced dawl ay-run), and a 60-seat indirectly elected Upper House, Seanad Éireann (pronounced sha-nad ay-run).
By Andreas Ladner
The Swiss Parliament – or better the Federal Assembly – was installed in 1848 when the former confederation of 25 independent cantons became a federal nation state. The form and organization of the Parliament was one of the main points of discussion while drafting the Constitution. Those in favour of a strong nation state – the liberal and predominantly protestant cantons which won the short civil war (“Sonderbund War”) – wanted a National Assembly with a composition reflecting the prevailing population proportions of the cantons. This would have put the smaller predominantly conservative and catholic cantons at a considerable disadvantage. They wanted a revised form of the Federal Diet (the legislative and executive council of the Swiss confederacy prior to 1848) representing the cantons equally. This, however, would have prevented the Liberals who were in the majority and located in the larger cantons of the Central Lowlands from building a more centralized and unified nation state.
By Cristiane Brum Bernardes
The Brazilian National Congress is bicameral, composed of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Both houses are located in the building known as Palace of National Congress, which is located in Brasília, the capital of Brazil.