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영어

Under the representative democracy of the Republic of Korea, the National Assembly is supposed to play a major role in making legislation. This paper addresses the issue of whether the National Assembly has really played a major role in the law-making process in Korea throughout 60 years of history of the Government. In order to see how the National Assembly performed its legislative function throughout 60 years, this paper examines what the National Assembly did under each Republic(Korea is under the sixth Republic). The number of bills proposed by members of the National Assembly is compared with the number of bills proposed by the President of the Government. And the percentage of bills that were proposed by members and passed the National Assembly among the total number of bills that became law is also examined to see how actively members conducted their legislative function. This paper found out that the legislative performance of the National Assembly depends largely on the interaction between the National Assembly and the Chief Executive. When the national legislature interacted with the executive branch on an equal basis, in other words, when the principle of the separation of power was well observed, the legislative performance by the National Assembly was moderately good. This was true during the beginning several years of the first and third Republic. On the other hands, when the President predominated over the National Assembly under the authoritarian regime, the legislative performance of the National Assembly was reduced to the minimum. This was true during the fourth and fifth Republic. It is fortunate that the National Assembly has begun to be actively engaged in performing its legislative function since the beginning of the sixth Republic under the current Constitution. Especially, since the 15th National Assembly in 1996, members has started to show their strong interest in the legislative activity. During the 17th Assembly from 2004 to 2008, the National Assembly prevailed over the executive branch, as far as law-making is concerned. This was a dramatic change from the past.