Party Competition Structure and Legislative Productivity of Local Councils: From the 4th to 6th Local Councils in Korea

Sung Eun Jung,Yongmin Kim

doi:10.3390/socsci11030094

Abstract

The Korean local autonomy system has a unique feature in that it grants councils, mayors, and governors the right to submit bills. Because of Korea’s extensive experience with authoritarianism, the relative legislative productivity of the assembly with respect to the head of the group—that is, the person who has the legislative initiative—has become an evaluation criterion for the activities of local councils in Korea. In this study, we address the question of why the relative legislative productivity of individual councils appears to be the cause of problematic awareness in situations where the legal and institutional conditions—for example, the organization and function of local councils, operating methods, and support systems—are very similar. Accordingly, regarding the 4th to 6th parliamentary period (2006–2018) of 15 parliaments, panel data analysis was performed to understand how the structure of party competition between the heads of the group and parliament and the structure of party competition within the assembly affects the relative legislative productivity of the assembly from a macro perspective. It was found that the relative legislative productivity of the parliament for mayors increases when there is a divided government rather than unified one and when the seat share of the first party in parliament increases. However, it was also found that the greater the difference in seat share between the first party in parliament and the second party in parliament, the higher the index of party concentration in parliament and the lower the relative legislative productivity of parliament. In Korea’s political reality, it was confirmed that the political structure of a divided government at the local level does not necessarily lead to a decrease in legislative productivity. The significance of this study is that these ideas were verified.

Highlights

The local autonomy system, which started with the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1945, entered a dormant period under the authoritarian regime (1961–1987) but went through democratization in 1987, which became a turning point for its revival
Since the first local elections in 1995, the true meaning of local government and local councils was defined through the first nationwide local elections in which residents directly elected the head of the local government and local council members at the same time
In a previous study dealing with the form of government and legislative productivity at the local government level, the results showed that members of the minority party were more active in checking the mayor belonging to the majority party, as well as the majority party itself, under the divided government structure (Park 2010), and results were similar with a divided government and a unified government

Summary

Introduction

The local autonomy system, which started with the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1945, entered a dormant period under the authoritarian regime (1961–1987) but went through democratization in 1987, which became a turning point for its revival. Since 1998, local elections have been readjusted to a four-year cycle, and until the time of writing this paper, the seventh local council and local government have been formed. The Korean local autonomy system has a unique feature in that it grants both parliament and the heads of local governments the right to submit bills. The legislative power is not exclusive to parliament, and the executive’s right to submit bills is recognized. To pull “the cart” of the local autonomy system, the two wheels—the heads of the local government and local council—are required to perform checks and balances on each other.

Methods

Results

Conclusion