양원제 개헌론 재고(再考)

Abstract

In August 2009, the Parliamentary Advisory Committee of Constitutional Revision proposed changing Korea’s National Assembly into a bicameral legislature. This paper introduces recent studies about bicameralism, especially Steffen Kailitz’s comparative constitutional analysis of bicameralism and Adrian Vatter’s policy performance analysis of bicameralism. Kailitz’s analysis proves that bicameralism and presidentialism are “children” of the separation of powers, and that second chambers in presidential democracies tend to be more powerful than in parliamentary or dual executive democracies. Vatter’s analysis shows that bicameral structures act as a significant brake on governmental intervention and on the expansion of the welfare state, and that bicameralism is a powerful veto player to block reforms in economic and financial policy. In the context of Korean politics, the Advisory Committee’s suggestion can be understood as adopting “strong bicameralism” and it hardly seems to match the Committee’s another suggestion of adopting a dual executive system. Moreover, If the second chamber, as some regionalists maintain, is designed to over-represent certain regional areas, it may cause the unequal redistribution of wealth from capital area to regional areas, together with the under-representation of youths in the capital area. And it will also accelerate the strong regionalistic tendency in Korean party politics.