Constitution-Making of Unified Korea: An Institutional Analysis with Special Reference to the Legislative Process

Abstract

My dissertation addresses the issues involved in constitution-making in the field of legislative process, with a rather practical objective in ind to make a contribution to the effort to draft a new constitution in case North and South Korea are unified in the future. Several major issues have been picked up for detailed analysis: the power to introduce bills to the legislature, structural issues regarding the composition of the legislature, procedural issues concerning the deliberation of bills in the legislature, presidential veto, legislative oversight of delegated legislation, and referendum as an alternative scheme to the ordinary legislative process.

The analytical framework employed to analyze the issues is based on two seeming contradicting themes of democracy and efficiency. The theme of democracy, in turn, involves prevention of the majoritarian bias (tyranny of the majority) and the minoritarian bias (overrepresentation of the minorities). What I intend to argue throughout the paper is that successful institutional arrangements for the legislative process should take account of the interaction of those three forces -- majoritarian bias, minoritarian bias, and efficiency.

Rather than provide a definite answer to constitution-making, this paper attempts to suggest what sort of considerations should be taken to make optimal institutional arrangements. Chapter I compares the legislative processes of the United States and the United Kingdom to provide background for the analysis in the following chapters. Chapter II develops a framework to analyze the issues of my research. Chapter III compares not only the legislative processes but also several other aspects of North and South Korea to present the information necessary to analyze the issues related to the constitution-making of unified Korea. Chapter IV analyzes the issues by applying the analytical framework developed in Chapter II to the current situation of North and South Korea, keeping in mind the present scheme of the United States and Britain as two typical models.