Abstract

Despite its ancient roots and its resilience in the contemporary world, bicameralism remains a disputed institutional arrangement. Since its origins, it has been highly debated and yet, there is no one model of bicameralism and so there is no one single universally accepted criterion for justifying it. Based on this premise, the aim of the chapter is to investigate the rationales of bicameralism developed in the literature through time and in different constitutional arrangements. By looking at the experiences of bicameral systems in EU Member States and at those countries where bicameralism was abolished, the chapter argues that bicameralism is rooted in different theoretical justifications, and national institutional arrangements continue to be strongly biased by their own historical, cultural and political factors.