Continuity in Congress: Does Spain Lead the Way?
By Victoria Alsina and Dane Gambrell
On March 12 the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament, suspended all face-to-face meetings, originally for two weeks, due to disruptions caused by COVID-19. Just two days later, a nationwide lockdown went into effect as the number of cases soared and Spain became one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic.
However, this pause on in-person meetings did not mean a total halt on the legislative process. Rather, MPs continued to vote on legislative proposals, while the Congress’s rule-making and agenda-setting bodies held meetings over videoconference and email.
Spain’s Congress of Deputies is one of many legislative bodies around the world that are piloting new methods to keep the lawmaking process going as in-person meetings are increasingly rare. These legislatures, which range from the National Assembly of Ecuador to the New Zealand Parliament, are turning to a combination of online meetings, electronic voting, and livestreaming to conduct lawmaking remotely.
But with this new approach comes new questions to be answered. Using the Congress of Deputies as an example, we explain several challenges in the shift to remote lawmaking and how Spain addressed them.
What is the legal framework?
In many countries, laws and internal regulations limit the legislature’s ability to convene remotely. The parliament of Chile, for example, had to amend the country’s constitution in order to deliberate and vote remotely. For the Congress of Deputies, prior to the pandemic, members were allowed to vote electronically in the cases of sickness and parental leave. The Bureau (the Congress’s internal regulatory body) simply extended this option to all members in response to the crisis.
How do you vote?
MPs cast votes using the Congress’s intranet system, which has been in place since 2012. Rather than voting in real time, voting is typically open for a two hour period before the session to vote for the alternative or amendment proposals and for a two hour period following the session in which the proposals are debated to vote the final text.
While so far voting has only been held during plenary sessions, the same method could be used for commission meetings. Similar electronic voting systems are used by both chambers of Brazil’s National Congress as well as Ecuador’s National Assembly.
How do you authenticate voters?
A natural question for remote lawmaking is how to verify, or authenticate, the identity of each MP in order to avoid fraudulent voting. Prior to the crisis, MPs would receive a phone call asking them to verify that they had voted electronically. Now, due to the larger volume of absences, each lawmaker simply enters a personal access code during the sign-in process for the electronic voting system. Chile’s Senate has an additional authentication mechanism. As both deliberation and voting is done over the Zoom video conferencing platform, members must also appear on camera state their votes.
Who deliberates, and how?
Currently, remote deliberation is not available for plenary sessions, nor for commission meetings; these deliberations still happen in-person. While plenary sessions are live streamed on the Congress’s website and the parliamentary television channel, MPs have no way to participate in the discussion. The Bureau and the Board of Spokespersons do, however, meet remotely via TPaas Videoconference, a cloud-based meeting software. This is a major difference from other legislative bodies such as France’s National Assembly, which conducts remote committee meetings but does not allow remote voting, and Brazil’s Senate, which now conducts all deliberations and voting electronically.
Will remote participation continue after the crisis subsides?
This last question is perhaps the most unclear. While MPs have introduced regulatory proposals that would allow the remote participation process to continue for all Members of Congress, these measures have not yet been debated.Though for the time being, it appears that the remote methodology is still wedded to the lifespan of the crisis.
As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts the legislative process, parliaments will continue to adapt their convenings, deliberations and voting mechanisms. Lawmakers can look to the Congress of Deputies as a model while also continuing to innovate and improve on the remote lawmaking process.
This post is part of a series on the Continuity of Legislatures. Find the whole series here.
