By Andy Jackson
The National Assembly is a week into what promises to be yet another acrimonious session. The way things are shaping up, we could very well see more legislative scrums on our TV sets.
Due to persistent divisions within the majority Grand National Party on Sejong City, President Lee's proposal to change the city's focus from a government administrative center to a science, education and industry hub is not likely to come up for a vote this session. Despite that, the debate over Sejong City will loom large over the National Assembly.
However, the bill that seems most likely to spark violence at the moment is a proposal to increase the penalty for committing violence in the National Assembly. That is not as ironic as you might think at first.
The Democratic Party and their allies in the Democratic Labor Party see ``physical resistance" to legislation they oppose as a legitimate tool against the GNP using its legislative majority to ``undemocratically" pass legislation over their objections. There is the irony you were looking for.
The Democrats' plan to counter the GNP bill with a proposal to eliminate the power of the National Assembly Speaker to bring bills up for a vote that have not previously cleared committee. That is an important issue to the Democrats since the Speaker's power to bypass committees negates the advantage that they have in controlling the chairmanship of some committees and in blocking votes in others.
While those competing bills tinker at the margins of how the legislature is run, others have bigger ideas.
GNP Chairman Chung Mong-joon has once again called for the parties to come together to amend Korea's constitution. While the main subject of Chung's proposed changes is the executive branch, he also mentioned possible changes to the legislative branch, including having quotas for female seats in the assembly.
While they are under the hood, legislatures should start looking for ways to better balance majority rules with minority rights by making changes in Korea's system of representation in the National Assembly.
There are several ways to do that.
One possibility would be to stagger the terms of National Assembly members so that half would be up for election every two years. That offers two advantages. The first is that it gives the public more regular input into the membership, and thus the policy direction of the National Assembly. Staggering terms would also help lessen the chance that a temporary majority would take overwhelming power in the legislature and enact measures that would be difficult for future legislators to reverse.
The combination of more frequent elections and staggered terms would encourage caution on the part of majority parties and lessen the chances that the public would be subject to too great a swing in policy between elections.
Another idea would be to have some seats, perhaps a third, assigned in equal number to each province and independent city. While having Seoul and Gangwon Province represented by the same number of legislatures would go against the principle of majority rule and the idea of one person-one vote, some overrepresentation of smaller regions would help lessen the chances of smaller regions being marginalized in the legislative process.
As a compromise between opposing views of over-representing smaller regions, the assigning of some seats by region could be accompanied by a rule requiring single-member districts to be more equal in population. (Under current rules, rural areas are overrepresented since they are allowed to have less populous districts.)
Korea already has experience with different modes of representation. Fifty-four of the National Assembly's 299 seats are chosen in a proportional representation system in which voters nationwide vote for the party rather than individual candidates. The idea there is to give smaller parties, which find it difficult to win over 50 percent of the vote in more than a handful of districts, a chance to win some seats. Most of the seats won by the minor Democratic Labor and Creative Korea parties came from the PR vote.
By better balancing the competing democratic imperatives of majority rule and minority rights, a reformed method of electing representatives could lessen the likelihood of a legislative minority resorting to ``physical resistance" to try to stop legislation.
Creating an electoral system that over-represents smaller regions would also have an important impact on the makeup of a post-unification legislature.
North Korea currently has nine provinces, the same number as South Korea. Although North Korea currently has only one independent city (Pyongyang), it used to have five others. If those five were once again made into separate administrative units after reunification, the North would have a total of 15 administrative divisions, only one less than in the South.
Having a portion of legislative seats apportioned equally to each province and independent city would give the northern half of the reunited Korea a disproportionate influence on national policy still assuring that most legislators would come from the more populous southern half.
If you are considering long-term reforms, it is not too early to think of such things.
Andy Jackson has been writing on Korean politics and regional issues for five years. He is the Chairman of Republicans Abroad-Korea. He can be reached at andyinrok@yahoo.com.