This study analyzes the impact of Congressional candidate selection processes on the number of bills that National Assembly passes (legislative productivity or performance) theoretically and empirically. The candidate selection process is seemingly unrelated to legislative productivity but they are linked through lawmakers’ incentive structure and decision-making in parties as detailed below. The candidate selection processes are classified into to-down processes and bottom-up processes: under the top-down processes, a representative of a party or a small number of party members such as caucus or committee chooses who will run for upcoming election, whereas under bottom-up processes, party candidate is selected in the primary election in which all the party members or district registered voters can participate. Under single-member district plurality system Korea adopts, these candidate selection processes theoretically imply the followings.

Under the top-down processes, party’s decision making is centralized to someone who rules candidate selection. Since legislators’ electoral success largely depends on the party nomination, they can’t help but to follow the nominator instead of representing their constituencies. This centralized decision making structure creates bullheaded extreme party lines to both ruling party and opposition parties. As a result, parties would not want to compromise their party lines, leading to lower legislative productivity.

On the other hand, party candidate is selected based on what potential candidates did for the district or individual quality under bottom-up processes. Under these processes, 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.

For empirical analysis, we used all the annual legislation data from1948 to 2009. Major parties in Korea partially adopted primary election as candidate selection process before the 17th Korean National Assembly election. Regression analysis shows that Korean legislature passed, other things being equal, about 164 total bills more annually under bottom-up process while it passed about 153 legislator-proposed bills annually under bottom-up process, ceteris paribus. This result implies that under bottom-up candidate selection processes legislature works more efficiently and produces more bills. Not to mention internal democracy within political parties on the normative ground, it is necessary to regulate, by constitution ideally or election law temporally, parties to adopt primaries as their candidate selection process in order to reduce conflicts among parties, enhance competition among legislators, and induce higher legislative productivity.

요 약

제1장 서 론

제2장 선행 연구

제3장 공천제도와 입법 생산성: 이론적 논의
　제1절 공천제도와 정당내 조직
　　1. 공천제도와 계파정치
　　2. 계파정치의 문제점
　제2절 공천제도와 정당간 갈등구조
　　1. 하향식 공천제도에서의 정당간 갈등구조
　　2. 상향식 공천제도에서의 정당간 갈등구조

제4장 실증분석을 위한 가설
　제1절 법안통과건수
　제2절 의원발의비율

제5장 실증분석
　제1절 자료에 대한 설명
　제2절 분석 결과
　제3절 분석 결과의 강건성 검증(robustness test)

제6장 정책적 함의 및 결론

참고문헌

부 록

ABSTRACT