Bicameral Development: Second Houses in Developmental Perspective - Lessons Learned in Afghanistan

Abstract

Legislatures are increasingly recognized as an important element in democratic governance deserving special attention and support by the international development community. Somewhat surprisingly, while stressing the importance of designing programs that take account of significant political and systemic features of the political landscape, there is little attention paid to the unique features of a bicameral legislature. This curious absence in the development literature is mirrored in the political sciences/comparative legislative studies arena as well. Yet while a majority of legislatures in the world (over 58% in the IPU Parline database) are unicameral, a significant percentage (42%) are bicameral. Moreover, they are not going away. While during much of the 20th century most changes in the number of legislative chambers have been from two to one, some have shifted from unicameral to bicameral (e.g. China, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, USSR-Russian Federation) or adopted a bicameral system in a new government (Afghanistan.) Kenya adopted a bicameral system as recently as 2012. Even if the trends were against bicameralism, the existence of such a significant number would still argue for coverage within the development literature.In a bicameral system, what distinguishes that legislature is the presence of a second or “upper” house. While differences exist between and among the various lower houses or house of representatives, those differences have been adequately addressed in the general literature on parliamentary development. Therefore, in this paper I will focus upon the unique characteristics shared by various upper houses and the relationship between the upper and lower house (representative role, selection process/criteria; tasks/legislative role; power differential; politically distinct entities; and administration) as it applies to parliamentary development. In doing so, I will use the work done by The State University of New York’s Center for International Development (SUNY/CID) with the parliament of Afghanistan through the course of the USAID funded Afghanistan Parliamentary Assistance Project (APAP) to provide an illustrative case study. While APAP does not illustrate all of the challenges presented by programming for an upper house, the Afghan parliament was restarted in 2005 virtually from scratch (after having been disbanded since the 1970s) and the project provided an extraordinary of technical support from the year preceding the first parliamentary elections up through 2012.