I know the lower house is selected through general elections, but what about the upper house?
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The House of Lords is made up of “peers” and these are now mostly people who have been chosen to become a peer. There is a selection committee to which anyone can be nominated, they then pass on reccommendations to the Prime Minister who chooses if they should become peers or not, and this is rubberstamped by the monarch. The PM also gets to have a list of “resignation honours” where they hand pick some people to become peers.
These are known as “life peers” because they are appointed for life.
[https://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/whos-in-the-house-of-lords/members-and-their-roles/how-members-are-appointed/](https://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/whos-in-the-house-of-lords/members-and-their-roles/how-members-are-appointed/)
There are also “spritual peers” who are appointed by the Church of England, they have 25 peerages and when one bishop dies, the church appoints another.
Finally there are “hereditary peers” who are descendents of the original fuedal lords that made up the House of Lords when it came into existence. There are 667 hereditary peerages, and they all used to sit in the House of Lords until the late 90s, when they were reduced to 95 seats, chosen from the 667 by election. There are now moves by the new Labour government to remove those as well.
[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/20/hereditary-peers-house-of-lords-end](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/20/hereditary-peers-house-of-lords-end)
For reference, there are 790 sitting peers in total: [https://members.parliament.uk/parties/lords/by-peerage](https://members.parliament.uk/parties/lords/by-peerage)
so, the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK, originally, was the landed nobility of the Kingdom. It was literally the place the Dukes, Earls and Barons came to talk, beseech, and pester the King, Game of Thrones style. The primary requirement was being a Noble, and ennobling someone automatically made them a Peer of the Realm, with rights in the house. However, over the centuries, the power has been successively reduced in relation to the House of Commons, the lower house, mostly to buy off discontent or the direct result of civil war.
The Current House of Lords still has a few members who are their by right of thier Inherited titles, but the majority of the members are Life Peers, whose peerage cannot be passed down to their heirs. They are created by the monarch on the advice of the current government*, and who are mostly former Members of Parliament (ie, politicians who were elected to sit in the lower house). Since most of the power in the current system sits in the Commons, being given a peerage is normally seen as a form of honourable retirement, often given to members of government when they are voted out of office as a parting “present” by the outgoing prime minister and the monarch.
Theirs also a bunch of bishops of the Church of England in the Lords, as “separation of church and state” is a American thing. Indeed, it was this integration of Anglicanism (and thus, the ability of Anglicanism to use the apparatus of state to push out other faiths) into the state that encouraged the Founding Fathers to add the religious freedom elements of the Bill of Rights.
Additionally, until very recently (2009), The Lords was the highest court of the UKs judiciary system (effectively, the formalised version of the aforementioned “pester the king about my problem” system) , and several members of the house were judges given a peerage in order to deal with this element of the lords remit. That has since been spun off into a separate Supreme Court of the UK, but that was still only 15 years ago.
In practice, the Lords can’t really *block* legislation anymore, not since the early 1900s and a stand off where the king of the time very nearly created *hundreds* of new life peers to get a majority and force reform though. What they can do is send it back to the commons with amendments and such, though theirs limits to how often they can do this to prevent endless amendment ping-pong
*when i say “government”, I’m talking about, roughly, what the americans would call the “administration”: the executive elements under the control of a single prime minister, and the senior cabinet ministers that are appointed by that PM, and would change when a new PM comes into power.
In the UK, the upper house is the House of Lords. Where members of the lower house are elected, Lords are mostly appointed for life, and 26 are bishops from the church of England. Historically, many lordships were also hereditary, meaning they passed from father to son, but that has been reformed and no peerages are directly inherited anymore. The remaining hereditary peerages are filled by a vote within the House of Lords.
The House of Lords has many of the same functions as the House of Commons: Lords can introduce legislation or propose amendments to legislation, the House of Lords debates proposed bills and government policy. It can also delay bills becoming law or in some cases prevent it. Its function is essentially to act as a legislative body that is disconnected from electoral politics.
In other countries, things can be completely different. There may not even be an upper house.
The upper house in the UK is the House or Lords. Traditionally it was made up of the hereditary peers, i.e., dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons, plus some archbishops and bishops. These days they’re increasingly “life peers”, meaning they’re appointments for life and not hereditary, but they’re not elected. In other countries modelled on the Westminster system, the upper house tends to be elected in much the same way as the US Senate, often with longer terms than for the lower house and with multiple representatives from larger constituencies. The Australian national government and most of the states are like this (although Queensland has only a lower house).
Bicameral parliaments, which are parliaments that have two houses or chambers, can have strong or weak bicameralism. In strong bicameralism, neither chamber can overrule the other and often these have some separation of tasks. In weak bicameralism, one chamber can, in the end, overrule the other.
The Dutch parliament, the Netherlands States General, also has two houses: the First or Upper Chamber and the Second or Lower Chamber. It has weak bicameralism where, just like the UK, the Lower Chamber is the most powerful. Only the Lower Chamber can introduce amendments to legislation, whereas the Upper Chamber can only vote for or against the bill as is. Supposedly, the Upper Chamber works as a *Chambre de réflection*, meaning that it re-evaluates the bills accepted by the Lower Chamber, slows the speed of lawmaking down and tests the feasibility of the proposed law and compatibility with the constitution and other human rights obligations. The Netherlands has no direct constitutional review, because the parliament is sovereign.
The Upper Chamber has half as many members as the Lower Chamber (75 versus 150) and it is indirectly elected. This means that in provincial elections the people vote for deputies for the provincial legislatures, who in turn vote for the Upper Chamber. Due to this linkage provincial issues tend to get overshadowed by national politics. Members of the Upper Chamber, often called senators, tend to vote along the same lines as their political party did in the Lower Chamber, but sometimes that does not happen. Then extra assurances by the minister or an alternative majority is needed.
The Canadian Senate is modeled on the Lords and it’s basically equal to the House of Commons, constrained mostly by the decent recognition by sitting Senators that the Senate is not as legitimate as the elected Commons. Senators are appointed by the King in council with his ministers, which means that whoever the Prime Minister appoints gets a seat. There are 105 seats in the Senate, and Senators serve until age 75. The Senate was deliberately set up with appointed members so that they would not have the power to thwart the decisions of the Commons. Most bills originate in the Commons, numbered C-*nn*, rather than the Senate (S-*nn*).
To keep the Senate to heel, Prime Ministers usually leave several Senate seats vacant (currently 10) and can appoint up to eight extras. If the Senate ever got frisky and defeated a Commons bill, the Prime Minister could appoint 18 “yes” votes tomorrow to get a 16% head start on a later attempt to pass the legislation.
The Prime Minister is constitutionally constrained to appoint based on regional diversity and may also take other attributes into consideration to maintain diversity of thought in the Senate. For example, it’s common to have person who is or used to be an organized labour leader, Hassan Yussuff currently. Most Canadians would have a hard time naming one Senator, and almost none could name three.
In an attempt to make the Senate more independent and appointments more transparent, Trudeau the younger expelled all Senators from his party’s caucus and set up an independent advisory board to provide a short list of Senate candidates. While the Prime Minister is not bound to accept their recommendations, Trudeau himself has only made appointments selected from the board’s lists. Some provinces have resisted participating in the board process because they fear that it would lend the Senate legitimacy. If the Senate is the legitimate forum for regional representation in Canada, then that could diminish the power of the Commons and the provincial legislatures. The next Prime Minister may choose to ignore the board, or even disband it. The board is not mandated in the Constitution or in law.
Usually the lower house is some form of direct representation of the populace while the upper house will allow some other power structure some influence to keep a balance of interests. For instance in federal states like Germany or the US the upper house represents the interests of the federal states. In the UK it represents or historically represented the interest of the nobility..
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