Establishing a Lebanese Senate: Bicameralism and the Third Republic

Throughout its history, Lebanon has been governed by a unique political contract according to which the country’s religious communities share power in a meticulously balanced and often unstable “consociational” arrangement. Many civil service posts—including all parliamentary seats and the top executive posts in government—are distributed according to sect, with the stated aim of maintaining a spirit of inter-communal harmony and coexistence. In practice, this system has promoted, at best, a weak central authority prone to repeated bouts of paralysis and breakdown, and, at worst, a government that functions primarily as a space for confessional elites to compete over parochial interests at the expense of general welfare.

How might Lebanon move beyond its system of political confessionalism toward a more representative and functional democratic model? One solution that has been proposed is a bicameral legislature, in which a newly created Senate would be reserved for the representation of religious communities while the lower house would represent individual citizens on a purely democratic, non-confessional basis. Despite the interest in this proposal, there have been very few attempts to explore the considerable range of options related to the upper chamber’s possible basis of composition, method of election, powers, and its relationship to other government bodies.

This paper aims to address this lacuna. It begins by examining the constitutional texts and agreements that call for the implementation of bicameralism, and presents some of the relevant questions, obstacles, and potential compositional models for a Senate. It then addresses the issues of the Senate’s powers, jurisdiction, and the impact of its creation upon the other branches of the government. It concludes by evaluating the arguments for and against bicameralism, and proposes that any credible process of reform will have to involve considerable changes to Lebanon’s existing institutional landscape—not merely the newly created Senate—for bicameralism to be effective.

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