Does a double negation make an affirmation? Non-legislative policy work in non-federal second chambers

The premise of the paper will be that it makes no sense to regard each state as a “closed” system where sources of law are free in their pursuits, given that they are the paramount expression of the people’s will as interpreted by their national assembly. Now the complexity of a “post-modern” legal system, along with the economic and supranational challenges, seem to have turned legislative processes being into policy-making processes, whose output is hard to account for. From this point of view, the peculiarities of non-federal second chambers as policy-making bodies can be enhanced, and their weakness in terms of “traditional” law-making can be overturned in terms of policy-evaluation. The paper will try to answer the following questions: can non-federal second chambers draw legitimacy from this kind of task, and how can it affect their mechanism of selection? After an introduction dedicated to how policy-evaluation can relate with democratic accountability, the paper will focus on the most relevant instruments of policy-evaluation granted to non-federal second chambers, and how they are used for this purpose. After all, “traditional” lawmaking was originally challenged once continental constitutions of the 20th century came into force: one of their main purposes was to impose a certain balance of interests on lawmakers, this turning the law itself into an instrument serving higher principles and purposes, found in constitutional provisions. As a matter of fact, politics (here understood as the whole of relationships among governments, party leaders and voters, aimed to gain consensus or power) and policy (i.e. finding the appropriate solution to a collective issue) represent two sides of the same coin, and the former cannot be regarded as the crucial one while the latter represents its “ancillary” feature. The paper will focus on three case studies: the English House of Lords, the Seanad Éireann and the Slovenian National Council. While the first one represents the archetype of the non-federal second chamber and is still related to the monarchical State, the second and the third one were created in different times to represent vocational interests. In spite of their different ratio, they are all questioned about their existence: the aim of the paper is to investigate how non-legislative policy work can make them more “acceptable” (and useful) besides a “proper” “law-making” chamber.