AHC: enduring tricameralism

Tricameralism (three legislative houses) has been employed by several Constitutions, often with each chamber meant to represent a distinct class. However, most of these arrangements proved ephemeral and some, like Bolivar's final constitution for Gran Colombia were never implemented at all.
What conditions would an enduring tricameral parliament require?
 
Pretty hard: it's a recipe for gridlock. The best chance is to make two chambers clearly inferior to the third, and are just revising chambers like the current UK House of Lords. However, even then it seems like it'd be very unwieldy.
 
I recall reading 3rd Republic France evolved 44-member parliamentary committees dedicated to foreign affairs and the budget/finance. Perhaps absent WII these might have evolved into separate chambers. Seems far fetched, I know, but an alternate Ausgleich for Austro-Hungary was the only other scenario that occurred to me.
On further reflection, though could tensions in late-Tsarist Russia have inspired a tricameral system with 2 "popular" houses plus an (appointed?) nobles-only chamber as an aristocratic bulwark?
 
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Perhaps the easiest way would be equivalents of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the (American) Senate.
 
On further reflection, though could tensions in late-Tsarist Russia have inspired a tricameral system with 2 "popular" houses plus an (appointed?) nobles-only chamber as an aristocratic bulwark?
Russian State Council (the upper house, part appointed by the Tsar, part filled by members ex officio, and part again elected by local elite bodies) was an aristocratic and bureaucratic bulwark. Simultaneously, nobility was overrepresented at the State Duma (the lower house) itself, due to undemocratic election laws.

It might be possible, though, to do the following:
1. Reform the Duma along the lines of 'one man-one vote'
2. Counterbalance the newly-democratic Duma with not one but two upper houses, one elected by the privileged estates (nobility, merchants, etc.) and another appointed by the sovereign.
Of course, it is a recipe for gridlock, but Nicholas II was happy with parliamentary gridlocks.
 
What if we have no French Revolution...or at least a very mitigated revolution where Louis XVI remains King and the Three Estates somehow persist?

The big challenge here would be to avoid the First and Second Estates being merged into a upper house not unlike the British House of Lords.
 
just a thought but from in the 83 constitution South Africa had a tricameral parliament with each house representing a different race. Eliminate the reductions in power of the parliament that went along with that constitution and you might get a sort of functional tricameral parliament

There is also the Republic of China. Under its original constitution it had three bodies which could make up the parliament. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to turn that into a real tricameral parliament
 
There is also the Republic of China. Under its original constitution it had three bodies which could make up the parliament. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to turn that into a real tricameral parliament

Hmm, IIRC it was more complicated than that - if you're referring to the 1947 Constitution, that is. The National Assembly was supposed to be the country's Parliament, whilst the Legislative Yuan was just a mere committee - similar to the relationship nowadays between the Europarliament and the Council of Ministers/Council of the European Union, except that unlike the Europarliament the National Assembly had legislative initiative. Yes, there were also the Control and Examination Yuans, but they really didn't constitute anything equivalent to a parliament in any sense of the word - not even a chamber. Like I said, complicated.
 
There is also the Republic of China. Under its original constitution it had three bodies which could make up the parliament. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to turn that into a real tricameral parliament

The National Assembly and Legislative Yuan can be considered houses of parliament, but the Control Yuan seems more like an (elected) Government Accountability Office than a chamber of parliament. On the other hand, there could be a National Assembly and then a bicameral Legislative Yuan for tricameralism.
 
Hmm, IIRC it was more complicated than that - if you're referring to the 1947 Constitution, that is. The National Assembly was supposed to be the country's Parliament, whilst the Legislative Yuan was just a mere committee - similar to the relationship nowadays between the Europarliament and the Council of Ministers/Council of the European Union, except that unlike the Europarliament the National Assembly had legislative initiative. Yes, there were also the Control and Examination Yuans, but they really didn't constitute anything equivalent to a parliament in any sense of the word - not even a chamber. Like I said, complicated.

I differ to you as you appear to be far more knowledgeable about the system in question than I. Could the Legislative Yuan have become a sort of ultra-small upper house type body or is that impossible with the nature of the body.
 
Also worth noting that, in the US, you can view consider the legislature to have 1 proper chamber, the House, and one weird hybride, the Senate, which has features of each of the traditional branches of government.

Anyway, don't necessarily write off gridlock as a prohibition against a tricameral legislature; thats certainly more a feature than a bug to many people, including those that drafted the US Constitution.
 
I differ to you as you appear to be far more knowledgeable about the system in question than I. Could the Legislative Yuan have become a sort of ultra-small upper house type body or is that impossible with the nature of the body.

From what I can tell, probably not - the National Assembly was largely a unicameral parliament-cum-electoral college. So your latter assumption is largely the case.

It gets even more complicated because both the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan were popularly elected and whilst the intent was for the National Assembly to be the Parliament, there were always those who viewed the Legislative Yuan in the same way. In that case, rather than the Europarliament/Council of Ministers analogue I mentioned in my last post (and which was the intent, in theory, of how it operated), in reality it was more like the modern-day PRC. In that case, the National Assembly would be a cross of both the Political Consultative Conference and the National People's Congress, on one hand, where all sorts of proclamations are made but in effect largely rubber-stamps policies made by the Legislative Yuan - apart from its other existing duties, which were quite extensive (i.e. electing the President, being the sole body through which changes to the Constitution could be made, etc. etc.). Hence, the Legislative Yuan was a popularly-elected Standing Committee that did all the nitty-gritty stuff. This is why when martial law ended in Taiwan in the 1980s and Constitutional reform began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of being the country's Parliament shifted to the Legislative Yuan from the National Assembly (since the latter was seen as a useless rubber-stamp body - an upper house with no real power) and the National Assembly was ultimately abolished.

This shift in power was obviously not was Sun Yixian and Jiang Jieshi had in mind, but that was the reality of how it happened. Had the ROC retained more provinces than just Taiwan and a few islands that made up the rump Fujian province (as well as, for a time, a few islands that made up the rump Chekiang province before that got conquered in the 1950s by the PRC), then the nature would probably differ. If given more time, there could be a possibility of things shifting towards a tricameral direction. Originally, Sun Yixian wanted to model the National Assembly on the Japanese Diet - this was during the late Meiji and early Taishô periods. If taken literally, then over time it could be possible for the National Assembly to be bicameral (a Senate modelled on the pre-war Japanese House of Peers and, to a lesser degree, the post-war House of Councillors; and a House of Representatives on the Japanese model), with the Legislative Yuan as the Standing Committee as per OTL. The end result of that would be very interesting in an ROC scenario were more provinces were retained.
 
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Technically the Canadian and British Parliaments are tricameral in that they are comprised of three separate bodies: HM the Queen, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords/Senate. If you want multi-person chambers one idea is to introduce a 2nd elected house (Senate) into the German system as a revising body.
 
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