Most legislatures are ‘bicameral’, that is they have two ‘Houses’.
In almost all, the ‘lower’ house (popularly elected by universal
suffrage in geographical constituencies) is the one which has ultimate
power and is the house to which (in parliamentary systems) the
government is responsible. In federal systems the upper house repre-
sents the constituent states; in many other systems it is indirectly
elected via panels of local government councillors. Other strange
variants are to be found, however, such as the House of Lords in
Britain, university representatives in Ireland and arbitrary divi-
sion of elected representatives into two houses in Scandinavia.
The United States is unusual in that, if anything, the Senate
(consisting of two senators from each of the fifty states) is the most
important chamber. In practice the crucial decisions on legislation
occur in bargaining between a joint committee of both houses and the
president.
The effectiveness of legislative representation is affected by many
other social and constitutional factors. Socially, for instance, most
legislatures tend to over-represent men, lawyers, elite educational
institutions and dwellers in the capital at the expense of women, non-
lawyers, those without formal higher education and farm workers.
Constitutionally there will be limits on the length of time for which
legislators serve between elections and there may be formal or
informal restrictions on the number of days the legislature meets.
One of the key questions asked about elected representatives is
‘Who do they represent?’ One school of thought suggests that elected
representatives are ‘mandated’ to vote in line with their party’s
electoral pledges to the majority of their constituency. The Burkean
tradition, based on the thoughts of Edmund Burke MP for Bristol in
the eighteenth century, however, rejects this and suggests that
elected representatives are independent and should weigh up the
arguments for and against on policy issues (see Birch, 1964). The
reality, as we shall see later in this chapter, is that elected repre-
sentatives are influenced by a number of factors including their own
party, pressure groups and constituents.
The judiciary
As was stated earlier, all liberal democracies endorse the principle of
an independent judiciary but they vary as to the degree of power
DEMOCRACY 179