Argentine Chamber of Deputies
The Chamber of Deputies, officially the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of the Argentine Nation, is the lower house of the Argentine National Congress. It is made up of 257 national deputies who are elected in multi-member constituencies corresponding with the territories of the 23 provinces of Argentina by party list proportional representation. Elections to the Chamber are held every two years, so that half of its members are up in each election, making it a rare example of staggered elections used in a lower house.
The Constitution of Argentina lays out certain attributions that are unique to the Chamber of Deputies. The Chamber holds exclusive rights to levy taxes; to draft troops; and to accuse the president, cabinet ministers, and members of the Supreme Court before the Chamber of Senators. Additionally, the Chamber of Deputies receives for consideration bills presented by popular initiative.
The Chamber of Deputies is presided over by the List of Presidents of [the Argentine Chamber of Deputies|president of the Chamber], who is deputized by three vice presidents. All of them are elected by the chamber itself.
Current composition
It has 257 seats and one-half of the members are elected every two years to serve four-year terms by the people of each district using proportional representation, D'Hondt formula with a 3% of the district registered voters threshold, and the following distribution:By political groups
127 of the current members of the Chamber of Deputies for the 2025-2027 period were elected in the 2025, while the remaining 130 were elected in 2023 legislative election. The governing party La Libertad Avanza, to which President Javier Milei belongs, is the largest parliamentary bloc with 95 deputies, while the main opposition, Homeland Force, holds 93 deputies.Requirements
Individuals elected to congress must be at least twenty five years old with at least four years of active citizenship. The elected individuals have to have been naturalized in the province in which they are being elected, or have at least two years of immediate residency in said province..History
The Chamber of Deputies was provided for in the Constitution of Argentina, ratified on May 1, 1853. Eligibility requisites are that members be at least twenty-five years old, and have been a resident of the province they represent for at least two years; as congressional seats are elected at-large, members nominally represent their province, rather than a district.Otherwise patterned after Article One of the United States Constitution per legal scholar Juan Bautista Alberdi's treatise, Bases de la Constitución Argentina, the chamber was originally apportioned in one seat per 33,000 inhabitants. The constitution made no provision for a national census, however, and because the Argentine population doubled every twenty years from 1870 to 1930 as a result of immigration, censuses were conducted generationally, rather than every decade, until 1947.
Apportionment controversy
The distribution of the Chamber of Deputies is regulated since 1982 by Law 22.847, also called Ley Bignone, enacted by the last Argentine dictator, General Reynaldo Bignone, ahead of the 1983 general elections. This law established that, initially, each province shall have one deputy per 161,000 inhabitants, with standard rounding; after this is calculated, each province is granted three more deputies. If a province has fewer than five deputies, the number of deputies for that province is increased to reach that minimum.Controversially, apportionment remains based on the 1980 population census, and has not been modified since 1983; national censuses since then have been conducted in 1991, 2001, 2010, and 2022. The minimum of five seat per province allots the smaller ones a disproportionately large representation, as well. Accordingly, this distribution does not reflect Argentina's current population balance.