공천제도와 입법생산성: 정치경제학적 구조 및 영향

초록

This study analyzes the impact of a legislative candidate selection process on legislative productivity theoretically and empirically. The candidate selection process and legislative productivity are linked through lawmakers’ incentive structure and within-party decision-making. In this context, two types of candidate selection processes, top-down and bottom-up, are contrasted and they hold the following theoretical implications. In a top-down process, party’s decision making is centralized to one who rules candidate selection. Such a centralized decision making structure creates bullheaded extreme party lines to both ruling party and opposition parties. On the other hand, in a bottom-up process, party’s decision making process is decentralized and a party finds it hard to take headstrong party lines due to various opinions reflecting different constituencies. Hence it would be much easier for parties to compromise or coordinate conflicting views, leading to a higher legislative productivity. Based on all the annual legislation data from 1948 to 2009 and 17th National Assembly Members’ legislative activity data, our paper reports that those theoretical conjectures are empirically supported. In this context, the bottom-up candidate selection process should be implemented in Korea on a full scale for enhancing legislative productivity as well as democratization of political parties.

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