On 11 and 12 June 2018 the Constitution Unit co-hosted two workshops with Rome LUISS university, the second of which was on ‘Bicameralism and the legislative process in the UK and Italy’. In this post Roberta Damiani summarises some of the themes from the day, and what conclusions can be drawn for those researching the work and influence of parliaments.

Studying the legislative process is not an easy task, and it becomes even more complex when done through the lens of bicameralism. Difficulties include the definitional issue of what constitutes influence on legislation, and the challenges of accurately reconstructing how two chambers of parliament work in practice and interact with each other. In the second day of events organised jointly by the Constitution Unit and LUISS University a well-attended workshop, held on June 12th in the Sala della Lupa in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, explored how to tackle this subject from both a methodological and a substantive point of view. Here I draw on some of the points raised during the workshop, in an attempt to stimulate debate on how to approach such topics in future work.

The comparative literature often attempts to rank national parliaments according to their policy-making powers. Usually, these stop at the formal powers that a legislature has – for instance, to introduce bills and to amend government legislation. Examples are the Parliamentary Powers Index compiled by Fish and Kroenig, and its weighted version proposed by Chernykh, Doyle and Power in 2016. These comparative studies can be very useful to have a broad overview of how formal legislative powers vary from one country to another. However, they also start to highlight some challenges of studying legislatures: when one moves down to the level of the individual country, reconstructing what actually goes on in a certain parliament tends to be much more complicated.
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