Bicameralism under Pressure: Constitutional Reform of National Legislatures Rome, LUISS Guido Carli, 2-3 May 2016 Conference Draft – Work-in-Progress How Does the EU Challenge Bicameralism? First Reflections from the Italian Constitutional Experience Pietro Faraguna * 1. Introduction As unusual as it may be, this introduction begins with the delimitation of the topic that this paper does not address. In fact, this is not a paper on the role of the second Chambers, and in particular of the Italian Senate, with regards to European affairs. Similarly, this paper does not address the highly debated problem of the possible inclusion of the EU in the category of bicameral systems. This is not due to the irrelevance of these topics 1 , instead, this paper focuses on a different topic. This paper addresses a much more general –and paradoxically mainly overlooked– problem of bicameralism, namely the impact of the European integration process on the possible justifications of bicameral systems. Bicameralism has been considered as “surprisingly under- researched” and “undertheorized”. 2 It has been called “a concept in search of a theory”. 3 Little wonder, if in the framework of this vastly overlooked and broad research area, almost no literature emerges on the specific issue of the impact of the EU on the very nature of bicameralism in EU Member States. This paper firstly investigates the main rationales and justifications of bicameralism. There are many prototypes of bicameral systems, and the concrete experience of constitutional States mixed these prototypes, originating a vast number of unique models that are not always easy to investigate and compare. Nonetheless, throughout these models, originating from the peculiar * Post-doctoral research fellow, Università di Ferrara 1 See generally, Schütze (2015), pp. 60 ff., Fabbrini (2013), Cooper (2012). More specifically on the former topic, see Baraggia (2016), Romaniello (2014). 2 Uhr (2006), p. 474 3 Smith (2003), p. 3