Abstract
The political weight of the Latin-American territories is clear from their electoral processes, administrative organization and party systems with ‘low nationalization’ (Mainwaring and Jones, 2003). Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Ecuador, among others, are a proof of the role of territory in their legislative representation. Bicameral systems turn out to be a solution to the democratic representation problem when both, territory and citizens are important. In this article, we explore the normative tension between the representation principle of “one person, one vote” and the principle of territorial equality that exists (not only) in federal systems. We also present an analysis of the bicameral representation systems following the above mentioned criteria. The majority of the literature –with some exceptions (e.g. Kymlica, 1996)– in one way or another has condemned the existence of territorial criteria. This point is also addressed in this work.
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