Associate Research Fellow Cho In-yeong, as a principal investigator, has explained the current status and challenges of the National Assembly in terms of improvement of the legislative branch by cross-national comparative research and game theory approach, and suggested measures addressing such challenges on the recognition that one of the biggest cause would be incongruity of the current institutional arrangement.
This brief presented four policy proposals that: (1) it is necessary to refrain from reinforcing or undermining the rights that the majority and minority respectively have in relation to the assembly proceedings at the same time; (2) it is necessary to avoid pursuing institutional reform as “Talking National Assembly” in which the only vote-winning majority takes the lead in the assembly proceeding; (3) it is necessary to institutionally balance between the majoritarian democracy and the consensus democracy to the extent of the political system for successful organizational and institutional reform into “Working National Assembly”; and (4) it is necessary to, if system reform to change the majority to the consensus is not available in the near future, it should be made at least to alleviate the conflict of values pursed by “Confronting National Assembly”.
“Korean democracy is based upon majority rule rather the consensus decision-making, thus low effectiveness may be expected even if the systems are reorganized to build up ‘Working National Assembly’, because they do not correspond well to the majoritarian democracy,” explains Cho. “If the reform is ultimately aimed at ‘Working National Assembly, we need to consider fundamental and complement institutional arrangement, instead of institutional reform resulting in conflicts.”
On the other hand, this study also paid attention on the inefficiency and low trust of the Korean National Assembly focusing on conflict between effectiveness and representativeness of the political system. The researcher’s analysis resulted that that the Korean National Assembly displays an outlier in the context of comparison with the OECD members.
* “National Future Strategic Insight” is a brief report which is issued every two weeks to provide strategic insights for our future based on in-depth analysis of major issues made by professional researchers at the National Assembly Futures Institute (NAFI).
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