Chamber Of Deputies Of Chile
The Chamber of Deputies of the Republic of Chile (Spanish: Cámara de Diputados) is the lower house of Chile's bicameral Congress. Its organisation and its powers and duties are defined in articles 42 to 59 of Chile's current constitution.
It comprises 120 deputies, who are elected to four-year terms, by direct universal suffrage, from 60 two-member electoral districts. Deputies must: be aged at least 21; not be disqualified from voting; have finished secondary school or its equivalent; and have lived in the corresponding electoral district for at least two years prior to the election.
Chile's congressional elections are governed by a unique binomial system that rewards coalition slates. Each coalition can run two candidates for each electoral district's two Chamber seats. Typically, the two largest coalitions in a district divide the seats, one each, among themselves. Only if the leading coalition ticket out-polls the second-place coalition by a margin of more than two-to-one does the winning coalition gain both seats.
The Chamber of Deputies meets in Chile's National Congress located in the port city of Valparaíso, some 120 km west of the capital, Santiago. The Congress building in Valparaíso replaced the old National Congress, located in downtown Santiago, in 1990.
Read more about Chamber Of Deputies Of Chile: Political Composition (2010-2014), Deputies (2006-2010)
Famous quotes containing the words chamber of and/or chamber:
“Another day. Deliberations are recessed
In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon
On which we wore things and looked well at
A slab of business rising behind the stars.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)