Contributions of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI) to the Debate on Methodology

This paper reviews the most important contributions of the International Commission from its origins to the present. The first Congress of this Commission tookplace in Lausanne in 1936, and its founding father was Emile Lousse. The methodological construction of Émile Lousse has come to be known as the Constitutional-Corporative. The Italian scholar Antonio Marongiu, whose theory was called neo-parliamentary, made a distinction between pre-parliamentary and parliamentary Assemblies. The studies of thelast twenty years have moved more and more towards consolidating those aspects thatbring out the vitality and force of socalled European "regionalism" in the framework of thedynamics of power and the related forms of representation.