Reform of the British House of Lords: A Test of Lijphart and
Tsebelis
Paper to the European Consortium of Political Research conference, Pisa, 6-8 September 2007
Meg Russell
The Constitution Unit
Department of Political Science
University College London
[email protected]
Please do not cite or quote without the author’s permission.
Abstract
The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal
veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak
bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system
offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, with the single veto player being the governing party.
But a reform in 1999, which removed the great majority of hereditary peers, seems to have given new strength to the
House of Lords. It has since defeated the government almost 400 times, and become an important site for interparty negotiation. This paper evaluates the changes to the role of the House of Lords in British politics and suggests
that they are signficant, but largely invisible according to these well-established theories. Recent developments in
Britain may therefore help to refine the theory of bicameralism and executive-legislative relations for the future.
Introduction
The House of Lords is one of the longest existent parliamentary chambers in the world. The
British parliament has been bicameral since the 13th century, when the representatives of shires
and boroughs (collectively known as the ‘Commons’) began to meet separately from the Lords
spiritual (i.e. Bishops) and Lords temporal. Since then the House of Lords has been in almost
continuous existence, with the exception of the brief period 1649-60 when it was abolished
following the English civil war (Owen Pike 1894; Longford 1998). By the start of the 20th
century, as the chamber still comprised largely hereditary peers who inherited their right to sit in
parliament, there were already lively debates about the need for reform. During the century there
were a series of reforms, but none of these were seen as fundamental. The most recent, in 1999,
removed the right of most hereditary peers to sit. However, given that this left a wholly unelected
chamber, the Lords continues to be widely seen as ‘unreformed’. Reform debates continue, and
largely focus on the question of introducing elected members.
The House of Lords therefore tends to be seen as a curiosity. Amongst major Western
democracies it is one of only two all-appointed second chambers (the other being the Canadian
Senate). From a distance, and indeed to many in the UK, the Lords is a historical relic with little
relevance to modern politics. However it is in fact far more interesting than that. Even before its
reform in 1999 the chamber was playing quite an active role in negotiating policy (Shell 1992;
Shell and Beamish 1993), and since this reform its role has significantly grown (Russell and Sciara
2006, 2007). It is becoming increasingly clear in Britain that the House of Lords needs to be
taken more seriously. The reform of 1999 may prove to have profound implications for British
politics (Russell and Sciara 2007a). But its effects also lead us to question some of the
assumptions of comparative politics. In particular the writings of recent theorists who have tried
1
to explain the influence of second chambers cannot adequately account for the new assertiveness
of the House of Lords following its reform in 1999. This suggests a weakness in existing theories.
This paper outlines the approach of two key theorists – Arend Lijphart and George Tsebelis – to
the classification of second chambers and their powers. It explains how these two theorists
classified the ‘old’ House of Lords. It then describes the reform of 1999 and its apparent effects.
This is followed by a review of the extent to which the established theories capture the change
which has taken place. The paper concludes by suggesting the need for some developments to
theory.
Two Established Theories of Bicameralism
Bicameralism has attracted the attention of many contemporary political theorists (e.g. Levmore
1992; Riker 1992; Sartori 1994). Many have focused primarily on the special case of the US (e.g.
Hammond and Miller 1987; Heller 2001). However two scholars are particularly widely cited for
their broadly comparative classifications of constitutional systems, which give substantial
attention to the question of the influence of second chambers: Lijphart (1984; 1999) and Tsebelis
(1995; 2002).
Lijphart makes bicameralism a central feature in his ‘consensus’ rather than ‘majoritarian’ model
of democracy. An ideal-type consensus democracy would include not just bicameralism but
‘strong’ bicameralism, which means an influential second chamber that ensures policy is the
subject of negotiation. In order to determine whether a political system is one of strong or weak
bicameralism, Lijphart classifies these systems along two dimensions. The first asks whether the
two chambers of parliament have ‘symmetrical’ or ‘asymmetrical’ powers, and the second
whether they have ‘congruent’ or ‘incongruent’ memberships (Lijphart 1984: 95-101; 1999: 20313).
The first dimension allows for the fact that the powers of second chambers differ widely. Some
second chambers, such as those in Spain and Ireland, have only a very limited power to delay
legislation, while others, such as the US and Australian Senates, have a formal veto over every bill
(Patterson and Mughan 1999; Russell 2000; Tsebelis and Money 1997). The formal constitutional
powers of the second chamber obviously are of great importance in determining its ability to
influence policy. But according to Lijphart, we must also take account here of how members of
the second chamber are selected. Although the House of Lords is unusual in being wholly
appointed, there are many second chambers around the world that either include some appointed
members or include members who are elected ‘indirectly’ - for example by local councillors.
Lijphart suggests that this aspect of composition is important in determining a chamber’s de facto
power, because ‘second chambers that are not directly elected lack the democratic legitimacy, and
hence the real political influence, that popular election confers’ (1999: 206). In order to be judged
to have ‘symmetrical’ power to the lower house, a second chamber must therefore have ‘equal or
only moderately unequal constitutional powers and democratic legitimacy’ (ibid). Few second
chambers achieve this. Others are considered to have ‘asymmetrical’ powers.
The second dimension focuses more substantially on the chamber’s composition. Where the two
chambers are ‘elected by different methods or designed to so as to overrepresent certain
minorities’, they are said to be ‘incongruent’ (Lijphart 1999: 207). Otherwise, the composition of
the two chambers is ‘congruent’. Here Lijphart concentrates almost exclusively on the territorial
dimension of representation, and the tendency in many second chambers to underrepresent
underpopulated areas. In his 1999 book he provides data specifically on this question, and uses
the Gini Index of Inequality (which captures disproportionality in the representation of areas
compared to their population) as a key indicator of incongruence. He points out that according
2
to this measure the US Congress is the most incongruent, thanks to the equal representation of
each state in the Senate irrespective of population and the wide diversity of these state
populations.
Whether a system is considered to be strongly bicameral depends on its classification along these
two dimensions. Strong bicameralism, according to Lijphart, is typified by symmetrical powers
and incongruent membership. A system which displays one of these characteristics but not the
other has medium-strength bicameralism, while weak bicameralism describes systems where
chambers have asymmetrical powers and congruent memberships. In his 1984 book Lijphart
judged that systems in the last category demonstrated ‘insignificant’ bicameralism, and were in
effect unicameral, while any others not judged ‘strong’ must be ‘weak’. However he revised this
judgement in the 1999 version, on the basis that even the weakest second chambers have some
influence on occasion.
Tsebelis was critical of Lijphart’s work (1995; 2002). One of his central criticisms was that
Lijphart took insufficient account of the partisan control of different institutions in the
constitution. He characterised different actors as ‘veto players’, acting upon the political executive
with the potential to block policy change. Veto players are ‘actors whose agreement is required
for a change of the [policy] status quo’ (Tsebelis 2002: 17). A second chamber clearly has the
capacity to be such a veto player. Like Lijphart, Tsebelis does not assume that a second chamber
with strong constitutional powers (even if it is democratically elected) will necessarily be
influential, if the two chambers are of similar composition. But Tsebelis focuses on partisan
rather than territorial representation. He suggests that if the second chamber is controlled by the
same political party as the executive, and therefore has the same policy preferences, it is unlikely
to have a significant impact. In Tsebelis’s language such a chamber is ‘absorbed’. He suggests that
‘as a result of the absorption rule, a second chamber may have veto power but not affect policy
outcomes’ (2002: 12). So a political system that on the face of it places many constraints on the
executive may in fact do little of the sort if those who wield formal vetoes are in fact of the same
partisan views. The number of veto players in a given system may also change over time. For
example the US Senate, despite the incongruent composition demonstrated by the Gini Index,
will make less use of the veto, and thus be less influential, during periods when it is controlled by
the same party as the presidency.
The other key element in Tsebelis’s system is the emphasis that he puts on the veto. Whereas
Lijphart does not dismiss a second chamber completely just because it lacks formal constitutional
powers, Tsebelis takes into account only those actors who have a real veto power.1 Most second
chambers, therefore, do not even have the capacity to be veto players, while even some of those
that do may have this power neutralised as a result of their partisan control. Given that only
seven of the 36 countries considered by Lijphart have second chambers with anything like coequal power, this clearly leaves a very small population of such chambers that meet the veto
player criterion.
The ‘Old’ House of Lords
Before its reform in 1999, the House of Lords continued to be dominated by hereditary peers.
None of the members of the chamber were elected, although a reform in 1958 created the ability
to appoint members as ‘life peers’, who did not pass their titles to their offspring. From this point
on few new hereditary peers were created, and most new members entered the chamber as life
peers. By the time of its reform the chamber included 759 hereditary members, 477 life members,
Tsebelis does note that ‘it would be incorrect to assume that second chambers without a veto power do not affect
legislation’ (2002:144). However he chooses to ‘focus on cases fulfilling this veto requirement’ (ibid).
1
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and 26 Church of England Bishops. The reform removed all but 92 of the hereditary members,
leaving a chamber dominated by life peers.2
The House of Lords originally possessed an absolute veto over all legislation. This power was,
however, reformed during the course of the 20th century. The 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts
limited the Lords’ power over most legislation, leaving it with a delaying power of approximately
1 year over ordinary legislation starting in the House of Commons.3 In comparative terms, this
was still a significant power, since few governments can afford to see their legislation delayed for
this long on a regular basis. However, in the 20th century the House of Lords only very rarely
used its powers. This can be explained by two principal factors. First, the large number of
hereditary peers came to be seen as increasingly indefensible in a modern democracy, meaning
that government in the House of Commons could effectively claim that it was unconstitutional
for the chamber to consider using its powers. Second, in practice, those hereditary peers that
subscribed to a political party overwhelmingly supported the Conservative Party. This meant that
tensions between the chambers were minimised in times of Conservative government, while
intervention by the second chamber was seen as anti-democratic when the left was in power.
After Labour won a landslide victory in 1945, a convention was established that the chamber
would not block bills seeking to implement government manifesto commitments. However, in
practice the chamber’s self-restraint was actually far greater than this.
In his 1984 book Lijphart classified the United Kingdom as being only weakly bicameral. The
basis for his judgement was that the two chambers had incongruent compositions (as he put it,
‘the overrepresented minority in the British House of Lords is, of course, the nobility’ (1984: 98)),
but extremely asymmetrical powers, on account of the chamber’s lack of veto combined with its
unelected membership. In his later book Lijphart had created a finer gradation of categories, and
classified the United Kingdom as having ‘between medium-strength and weak bicameralism’
(1999: 212). To describe the House of Lords as weak or even very weak seemed to be a fair
assessment of the situation, given its track record, and this judgement was uncontroversial.
Tsebelis was similarly able to dismiss the House of Lords as not being a serious policy actor. This
was a more straightforward judgement, since he needed to look no further than the chamber’s
lack of veto power. His judgement that the United Kingdom had only a single veto player (the
governing party in the House of Commons) was consistent with the general view that the
Westminster Model concentrated excessive power in the hands of the single party executive
(Lijphart 1984, 1999; Wilson 1994). In fact in one place he seemed to suggest that the United
Kingdom was effectively unicameral (Tsebelis 2002: 78), a conclusion which chimed with that of
some British constitutional experts that Britain had ‘in effect a unicameral system of government
but with two chambers of parliament’ (Bogdanor 1997: 119).
The 1999 Reform and its Consequences
The reform of the House of Lords in 1999 did not change any of the fundamentals as seen by
Lijphart and Tsebelis. Even the politicians that proposed the reform presented it as a temporary
step. The Labour Party’s 1997 manifesto proposed that Lords reform would be a two-stage
process, with the first stage being the removal of the hereditary peers. This reform was enacted in
a short bill which passed through parliament during 1998-99. The result was that the new House
of Lords which met for the first time in November 1999 had been stripped of 655 members, and
was consequently much smaller. The largest group by far remaining were the life peers.
The original intention was to remove all hereditary peers, but a compromise resulted in 92 being retained (see Shell
2000).
3 The Parliament Acts did not affect its power over legislation starting in the Lords, where it retains a veto. Around
one third of bills, mostly those which are relatively uncontroversial, begin their passage in the Lords.
2
4
The House remained wholly unelected, and could still be described as ‘unreformed’, particularly
given that the government had promised a second stage – which by 2007 has still failed to be
implemented. The detail of the second stage was never specified, though it was expected that this
would include the addition of elected members. Since then, there have been continual arguments
about the merits of introducing such members, with many fearful that such a reform would make
the chamber far more assertive by giving it democratic legitimacy (Kelso 2006; Mclean, Spirling
and Russell 2003; Norton 2004). These arguments remain unresolved, and there are significant
splits in both main political parties about the future of reform.
Despite appearing unreformed however, there has been much change in the chamber’s behaviour
since 1999. The most visible evidence comes in terms of defeating government legislation. Since
its reform in 1999 the House of Lords has inflicted almost 400 defeats on government bills - an
average of roughly 49 per year. Comparisons with earlier periods are difficult. During the period
1979-97 the chamber defeated the government on average 13 times per year, but this was a
period of Conservative government, and therefore subject to less Lords’ resistance than periods
of Labour government. There is little data available for periods before this, but the highest
number of Lords defeats on record for a parliamentary session was for 1975-76, when the
Labour government suffered 126 defeats.
On the face of it the Lords’ behaviour since 1999 may therefore be seen as simply a reversion to
type: it always defeated Labour governments more, and continues to do so. But it is not only the
quantity, but also the nature of Lords defeats that are changing. In the 1970s Labour
governments may have been defeated frequently by the Lords, but these defeats were relatively
easily overturned in the House of Commons. In Britain the system for resolving differences
between the chambers is simply for a bill to shuttle back and forth until a mutually acceptable
form of words can be agreed (or, in the event of a deadlock, the House of Commons can pass a
bill alone after a delay of roughly a year). When such disagreements occur on there has
conventionally been great pressure on the House of Lords to submit to the will of the elected
house. Under the Labour government 1974-79 there were only four bills on which the House of
Lords sought to insist on its amendments through sending them back to the House of Commons
a second time. On all other occasions the Lords accepted the primacy of the Commons and
backed down, and on no occasion did the government have to force a bill through without the
Lords’ consent. In contrast, in the first full parliament since the 1999 reform (2001-05) there
were 17 bills on which the Lords insisted on its amendments. In two cases elements of a bill were
rejected by the Lords four times, and one bill (the Hunting Bill 2004) was passed in the end
without the Lords’ consent.
A detailed study of the impact of defeats in the chamber since 1999 shows that the government
now frequently compromises with the House of Lords in order to get its legislation through
parliament (Russell and Sciara 2007b). Although formally Lords’ defeats can be easily overturned
in the House of Commons, in practice this happens in only around four out of 10 cases. In the
remainder the House of Lords wins some policy concessions, and in four out of 10 cases the final
outcome is closer to the Lords’ position than to the original position of the government.4 Lords’
defeats therefore now have a significant impact on policy. But perhaps more importantly (and
4 There are various reasons why the government may choose to compromise with the Lords rather than asking the
House of Commons to reverse Lords defeats outright. The most obvious is that parliamentary time is lost if bills
shuttle back and forth and are repeatedly debated in each chamber. The government will naturally prefer to use this
time for the discussion of other bills. In addition, opposition by the Lords to certain clauses will draw attention to
policy controversies in the media and amongst pressure groups. The government will often prefer to avoid such
attention.
5
less measurably) the government often compromises at an earlier stage of the legislative process
in order to avoid Lords defeat. The greater assertiveness of the House of Lords in pressing its
amendments on the government has therefore in turn changed the government’s behaviour and
made it more receptive to the demands of the upper house. This change on the part of
government is visible, for example, through the increasing number of informal consultation
meetings that are being held with peers. Other responses by government to the new situation
have included changes to the way in which Labour peers are appointed, to place more emphasis
on attending and voting reliably, and changed attitudes to the power of the House which have
acted as a brake on reform.
It is very clear that following the 1999 reform members of the House of Lords feel more
confident and therefore more assertive. When the reform took place the government stated that
it would make the chamber ‘more legitimate’, due to the anachronistic presence of hereditary
legislators being ended.5 In its aftermath members of the chamber freely admit to feeling so: a
survey of peers in 2005 found that 78% believed the chamber to be ‘more legitimate’, while a
survey in 2007 found that 81% believed peers have ‘more confidence to demand policy change’
and 85% that the chamber ‘has become more assertive’ since 1999.6
The reasons that this may be so are several. The most straightforward is that the 1999 reform
removed most of the hereditary members of the chamber, and that the appointment method for
the remaining members - though not democratic - is more easily defensible.7 Even if no changes
had occurred this would have been likely to boost the chamber’s sense of its own legitimacy to
some extent. But the removal of the hereditary members had significant knock-on implications
for the composition of the House, and each of these in turn had potential to boost the chamber’s
sense of legitimacy further still. For example most hereditary peerages were handed down
through the male line, and the proportion of women amongst the hereditary peers was only 2%.
This extreme male dominance ended as a result of reform, and the current proportion of women
amongst life peers is 23% (slightly higher than that amongst members of the House of
Commons.) In addition, hereditary peers were almost exclusively white, but particularly after a
number of appointments in recent years, there are significantly more ethnic minority members of
the Lords than of the Commons. The removal of the hereditaries also left a body of members
had entered the chamber in their own right, many of them having reached the top of their
professions. The reformed chamber was therefore more of an ‘expert’ house than that which had
preceded it. Despite its unelected nature, the House of Lords can therefore be seen as more
representative in some respects than the lower house.
The most important dimension in which this is the case is that of party. The old House of Lords
was dominated by the Conservative Party. Lijphart described the House as having ‘a permanent
Conservative majority’ (1984: 98) - this was strictly speaking incorrect, as the chamber contained
a large number of independent members who took no party whip at all, but the Conservatives
were by far the largest party. The removal of the great majority of hereditary peers ended this
situation. Immediately before reform the chamber included 471 Conservative members, but this
was overnight reduced by more than half. Since 1999 the Conservatives, the Labour Party, and
the independent ‘Crossbenchers’ have each held roughly 200 seats in the House, with the third
Then Leader of the House of Lords Margaret Jay, House of Lords Hansard, 14 October 1998, col. 925.
Research carried out by the Constitution Unit and funded by the ESRC. For 2005 survey n= 374, for 2007 survey
n= 353, 369.
7 Responsibility for appointing members of the House of Lords continue to rest with the Prime Minister. In practice
since 2000 the Prime Minister has chosen only appointees for his own party, and allowed other party leaders to
choose the representatives of their parties - although the Prime Minister continues to decide how many appointees
there will be from each party. In 2000 a House of Lords Appointments Commission was established, which vets
party nominations for propriety and also chooses independent members of the House.
5
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6
party, the Liberal Democrats, holding around 70, and the Bishops and assorted others around 40
collectively. No party therefore commands a majority, and to win a vote in the chamber the
government must gain support from others outside its own party group. In this sense (if not in
Lijphart’s sense, which we will return to) Lords reform has therefore pushed Britain in the
direction of consensus democracy.
Extremely importantly, though ironically, the party balance in the House of Lords now more
closely reflects the balance of votes cast at general elections than does that in the House of
Commons. This is the most major sense in which the House can be considered more
representative than it was. It is a sense which the Liberal Democrats in particular are keen to
draw attention to. It is they, along with the independent members, who in practice hold the
balance of power in the reformed chamber. This gives them the leverage that they lack in the
House of Commons, which continues to be elected by a plurality system that the party has long
campaigned to reform. As a Liberal Democrat spokesperson pointed out in the House of
Commons in March 2006 ‘the government may have a majority of members in this place, but it
has a lower share of the vote than any majority government since 1832. It has no justification for
complaining that the House at the other end of the corridor should not do its job’.8 The Liberal
Democrats therefore seek to draw attention to the illegitimacy of the House of Commons,
contrasted to the relative representativeness of the unelected House of Lords. It is this in
particular which has given them an increased confidence to use the Lords to press for policy
concessions, in allegiance with the main opposition party the Conservatives. As already stated,
many such concessions are won. The two opposition parties are strengthened in their resolve by
the knowledge that the public are relatively supportive of Lords intervention. An opinion poll
commissioned by the Constitution Unit in 2005 found that two thirds of respondents believed it
was justified for the House of Lords to defeat the government on policy, where that policy lacked
popular support.9
Theory and Reality
The fact that the reform in 1999 significantly strengthened the House of Lords is becoming
gradually more widely recognised in the UK. It has already been clearly acknowledged by the UK
government, and is one reason for many ministers’ reluctance to press ahead with further reform
to introduce elected members to the chamber. As Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw
said in March 2007 ‘The changes we have already made to the Lords – to remove most
hereditary peers, and to ensure no party can ever have a majority – have already made the Lords
more assertive. A reformed House would be even more active’.10 It is generally accepted that a
second stage of reform to introduce elected members would result in even greater boost of
confidence, and willingness by the chamber to use its powers. However without such a change
the chamber remains ‘unreformed’ not only in the eyes of the British public, but also our two
theorists.
Starting with Lijphart, the House of Lords retains the same formal powers it always had.
Nonetheless, in his definition of power ‘symmetry’ or ‘asymmetry’ Lijphart recognises that de facto
power depends also to some extent on composition, so it is not inconceivable that a
compositional change could have strengthened the chamber. Had it moved from being unelected
to elected, it would in Lijphart’s eyes have gained additional legitimacy that would have enabled it
to make greater use of its powers. It is clear however that his reasoning which assigns legitimacy
to directly elected chambers, but not to others, is too crude. Indeed Lijphart himself notes that
Simon Hughes, House of Commons Hansard 13 March 2006, col. 1259.
Research conducted by MORI in May 2005. N = 1007.
10 The Independent, 8 March 2007.
8
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7
the German Bundesrat has been described as ‘one of the strongest second chambers in the world’
(Edinger, quoted in Lijphart 1999: 207), but the German second chamber is not directly elected rather, its members are appointed by state governments. This already makes his assumptions look
decidedly shaky. It is a fair conclusion that legitimacy affects a chamber’s ability to use its powers,
but what the German case shows is that legitimacy can be found in different places, and is not
straightforwardly correlated with degree of democratic participation. Recent developments in the
House of Lords offer further illustration of this fact. The chamber has gained in legitimacy, or at
the very least a sense of its own legitimacy, as a result of changes not flowing directly from a
democratic process, but which have increased its representativeness on various dimensions. In
arguments with the government it also benefits from other features which strengthen its resolve.
These include the fact that it is now difficult for the government to complain about the
intervention of an unelected chamber, given that this same government has made no move to
democratise the chamber after more than 10 years in power.11 Indeed, as the Liberal Democrats
have sought to do, it is possible to raise questions about the legitimacy of the House of
Commons as a result of its electoral system. Such concerns play on the prevailing culture of
‘democratic disengagement’ and decline of deference which pervades most Western democracies.
In such a climate it may be possible for a representative and ‘expert’ chamber to gain legitimacy
as a check on an elected lower house.
In terms of Lijphart’s other dimension, the ‘congruence’ or ‘incongruence’ of the two chambers’
memberships, there has been some change. In fact in some respects the House of Lords has
become more similar to the House of Commons in its membership. As Lijphart pointed out, it
formerly performed a classic second chamber function in representing a particular minority: the
traditional upper-class. This is no longer the case, and the chamber is made up of members of the
professional classes of a not dissimilar kind to the lower house. As noted above, Lijphart paid
little attention to the partisan makeup of a second chamber and concentrated instead primarily on
territorial representation. However, clearly there have been important changes in the House of
Lords in partisan terms. The overwhelming preponderance of Conservative peers has been ended,
and therefore with Labour in power the two chambers are also more similar in terms of party
control. On this basis one British scholar, seeking to assess whether the recent constitutional
reform programme in the UK has moved it towards ‘consensus democracy’ on Lijphart’s scales,
has concluded that ‘Britain has, therefore moved from a system of medium to weak bicameralism
to one which could now be better described as simply weak bicameralism’ (Flinders 2005: 81).
This is a correct interpretation of Lijphart, but bears little relation to reality. In fact far from
becoming weaker, events in Britain over the past eight years have demonstrated that
bicameralism is becoming stronger.
Lijphart’s system therefore does not offer us any help in explaining recent events. Tsebelis may
perhaps have more to offer. One of the strengths of his veto player analysis is that it takes
account of partisan control of different institutions, and recognises that ‘partisan’ veto players as
well as ‘institutional’ veto players can play a role. Tsebelis would therefore recognise that the
move from a chamber dominated by one political party to a chamber where no party can secure a
majority without the support of others results in an increase in the number of veto players. Given
the current constellation of parties in the House of Lords, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats,
independent Crossbenchers, and even rebellious members on the Labour benches (or indeed
Bishops) have the capacity to make the difference and ensure that legislation is blocked (Russell
and Sciara 2007). This creates a far more complex situation for government, and results in
negotiations between various party blocs on a far greater level than before. In this respect,
Tsebelis’s analysis describes the situation far better than Lijphart’s notion of ‘incongruence’.
11
For further discussion see Russell and Sciara (2006a).
8
The weakness of Tsebelis’s analysis is that pointed out earlier: the dependence on the veto. The
House of Lords has gained in de facto power without being given any more formal constitutional
power. But in Tsebelis’s terms, it was not a veto player before, and is not a veto player now, as in
normal circumstances it simply doesn’t have a veto. The subtlety of Tsebelis’s analysis with
respect to partisan control is not matched by subtlety when it comes to describing formal powers.
Just as Lijphart is crude with respect to legitimacy, Tsebelis is crude with respect to power. The
changes to the House of Lords, unless its powers were reformed to restore the veto, simply do
not feature on his radar at all.
Conclusion
There is clear evidence that following its reform in 1999 the British House of Lords is becoming
stronger. As a result, policy making in the British parliament is becoming more consensual, with
greater requirements for the government to consult with the opposition, minor parties, and
independents. This is a potentially important change. But it isn’t captured by the analysis of either
Lijphart (1984, 1999) or Tsebelis (1995, 2002), to whom the recent changes would simply appear
invisible. This shows up a clear weakness in both of these theories.
The weaknesses in Lijphart are twofold. First, while he correctly recognises that legitimacy is
important in determining a second chamber’s de facto power, his assumptions about what
underlies legitimacy are too crude. Arguments about the nature of legitimacy are well-established
in the political science literature (Barker 1990; Beetham 1991; Saward 1991). In particular it is a
matter of controversy whether legitimacy can be objectively defined, or whether it is more
appropriate, as Weber (1947) did, to conclude that legitimacy is principally a matter of perception.
The case of the House of Lords illustrates that perceived legitimacy can increase even without
democratic reform, and that one unelected chamber may be considered more legitimate than
another. Particularly in an age of democratic disengagement, it may also be possible for unelected
institutions to challenge the decisions of elected ones.
The second difficulty with Lijphart is the way in which he constructs the dimension of
congruence/incongruence. Here his principal interest is territorial representation, which fits
neatly with his inclusion of bicameralism on the ‘federal-unitary’ dimension which is used to
determine whether a system is a majoritarian or consensus democracy.12 But in modern partydominated parliaments territorial issues are usually less important than partisan control. This has
been recognised by other authors. For example Sartori notes that the de facto power of second
chambers depends on the degree of similarity-differentiation between the memberships of the two
houses, but that what matters in terms of similarity is ‘the extent to which a government obtains
consonant majorities in both Houses’ (1994: 185). Partisanship is also, of course, made central by
Tsebelis. In Lijphart’s terms it could be said that modern bicameralism belongs on the executivesparties dimension rather than the federal-unitary dimension.
Tsebelis fares rather better in terms of understanding the importance of party. But his analysis
takes no account at all of legitimacy, and the fact that the de facto power of a second chamber may
vary according to how legitimate it feels, and is felt to be. The biggest weakness of the analysis is
that it fails to register institutions (or partisan actors) that do not have a literal veto power.
Although Tsebelis admits that this is a simplifying assumption, it means that a great deal of detail
is lost, because there are many institutional or partisan actors who wield considerable power,
short of a veto. Second chambers are perhaps the most obvious example, but not the only one.
12 Lijphart uses 10 factors, of which bicameralism is one, but in the later part of his book he boils these down to two
dimensions: the executives-parties dimension and the federal-unitary dimension.
9
While his analysis clarifies that not all veto players may exercise a veto because of partisan control,
he does not point out that others with distinct partisan perspectives from the executive may
exercise influence even without a veto. A model which captured gradations of power, as well
subtleties of partisan control, would come closer to representing the reality in many modern
democracies.
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