The danger of unicameralism in Chile

Old Congress building, where the new Chilean constitution will be written, in Santiago.IVAN ALVARADO (Reuters)

On Thursday, January 27, the Political System Commission of the Constitutional Convention approved, in a tight vote, the formula of a "Plurinational Congress as a deliberative, parity and plurinational body that represents the gathered peoples and nations recognized by this Constitution and the laws. The Congress is unicameral in nature and exercises legislative power and the other powers entrusted by the Constitution and the laws.” Although this approval is preliminary, and the Plenary of the Convention still needs to do so, the impact of this change on the decentralization of power is causing concern. Below we present a series of arguments that, taking into account the need for real and not cosmetic change in the current institutions in Chile,They propose an innovation that would improve the structure of the Legislative and that would not imply eliminating, but rather completely reforming, the second chamber.

There is broad agreement that the New Constitution should decentralize power to the regions and local executives.

However, it is often ignored that the power of subnational governments is not measured only by how many powers of self-government they have.

Another relevant dimension when apprehending regional power is that of shared power (Hooghe 'et al', 2016), that is, how much and how regional powers can influence decisions at the national level.

Shared power is understood as the capacity of the regions to (i) co-legislate at the national level, (ii) determine the distribution of the collection of national taxes in the territory, (iii) be consulted when taking national debt, (iv ) approving constitutional reforms, and (v) the existence of meeting instances for local and national executives to determine public policy.

It is evident that the first four indicators are NOT achieved with unicameralism. Due to the population distribution of Chile, strongly concentrated in some regions, it is impossible for the same chamber of representatives of the regions to have the power to protect public policy areas that concern the territories. For this to be the case, the population largely concentrated in the Metropolitan Region would have to be severely underrepresented. Even if a mixed electoral system is used, it is mathematically impossible to ensure veto and decision power to the regions while respecting the democratic ideal of one person, one vote. A majority composed of half plus one of the representatives could make decisions without any consideration of the less populated regions,because even if the regions manage to get half of that single Chamber to be made up of representatives of the regions with a criterion of equal representation, this half could be effectively ignored.

This is not the only danger of unicameralism.

We are facing a deep crisis of representation, there are no longer institutions that vertically integrate the territory from the local to the national, as political parties used to do.

A new State with powerful regions, with a lot of self-government but no shared power, runs two great risks with a single legislative Chamber: (1) the self-government enshrined in the Constitution becomes more precarious, since with two thirds of the single Chamber it could reform the Constitution and re-centralize power;

(2) in the absence of institutions that connect the national with the regional, political parties or a second territorial Chamber, there is a decoupling between the politics of the regions and the national, causing competition instead of cooperation,

The legislative structure that guarantees shared power to the regions and protects the constitutionally enshrined decentralization is a national bicameralism different from the current one. The current one is consistent, because the representation in the regional constituencies varies by population and is symmetrical because the Senate has the same powers as the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies, being able to block all types of legislation. We therefore propose a bicameralism in which each region is represented by the same number of seats in the second Chamber, regardless of its population: a Territorial Chamber.

This is called incongruous bicameralism, because the different institutions embody different principles of representation: the Chamber of Deputies represents the people more or less proportionally to the population density of each district, and the Territorial Chamber represents the regions. on an equal footing, giving them voice and vote in the decisions of the national government on matters of regional interest.

Thus, it is possible to think of a second Chamber with gender parity and made up of three seats per region, to promote the representation of the minority.

It would be convenient for the system for electing representatives to also contemplate affirmative actions for special protection groups, such as gender-sex diversities and people with disabilities, as well as for some of these seats to be reserved, in the regions with the largest indigenous population. , to give the original peoples a double representation in Parliament: as a population in the Lower House and as a territory in the second.

To avoid the problems related to the delay and duplication that the current Senate imposes on the processing of laws, this new bicameralism may be asymmetrical.

This would imply that the Chamber of Deputies has more prerogatives than the Territorial Chamber, and the latter is only equal to the former for matters relevant to the regions (to be stipulated constitutionally).

In other areas, the Lower House could urge the second, avoiding delays, or insist on an absolute majority, thus avoiding the third process.

This incongruous bicameralism (because the chambers would represent different principles: population and territorial), would become symmetrical only in constitutionally stipulated matters of regional impact, in order to deepen and protect decentralization.

Julieta Suárez Cao

and

are professors of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

has a Master's in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

They are all collaborators of Public Agenda

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