Editing Federalism (section)

===Bicameralism===
The structures of most federal governments incorporate mechanisms to protect the rights of component states. One method, known as '[[intrastate federalism]]', is to directly represent the governments of component states in federal political institutions. Where a federation has a [[bicameral]] legislature the [[upper house]] is often used to represent the component states while the [[lower house]] represents the people of the nation as a whole. A federal upper house may be based on a special scheme of [[apportionment (politics)|apportionment]], as is the case in the [[senate]]s of the United States and Australia, where each state is represented by an equal number of senators irrespective of the size of its population.

Alternatively, or in addition to this practice, the members of an upper house may be indirectly elected by the government or legislature of the component states, as occurred in the United States [[Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|prior to 1913]], or be actual members or delegates of the state governments, as, for example, is the case in the [[Bundesrat (Germany)|German Bundesrat]] and in the [[Council of the European Union]]. The lower house of a federal legislature is usually directly elected, with apportionment in proportion to population, although states may sometimes still be guaranteed a certain minimum number of seats.