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

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.