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Please forgive the naivety of my question (and adjust the tags if necessary, I'm a newbie).
Often, election campaigns are dominated by one or two themes. Populist parties profit from this. One remedy could be to have many Houses (say, 10 or more) each with a restricted domain of competence.
Has this ever been seriously studied? I would really appreciate some references.
One remedy could be to have many Houses (say, 10 or more) each with a restricted domain of competence.
But those kinds of restrictions tend not to work in practice. For example in the United States (US), all tax bills are supposed to originate in the House. But the Senate gets around this by taking an existing bill with any kind of tax whatsoever and replacing it in its entirety with their own bill. Example of a tax bill that effectively started in the US Senate.
How do you divide competencies? For example, you could have a business legislature and an environmental legislature. But what happens when the environmental legislature wants to regulate business practices? Maybe they have to agree. What happens if you add a labor legislature? What happens if it is a military contractor? Does the defense legislature also get involved? Foreign Affairs might get involved with an international company.
Who chooses the legislatures? Do I have to vote for ten or more representatives, each with specialized competencies that I don't really understand? What happens if I just vote for less spending and taxes?
To some extent this is already done. Each legislature tends to have specialized committees with a subset of the overall legislators. The overall legislature still votes on the final bills, but the details are mostly set in the committee. US House committees.
