노태우 정권의 정부조직법 개정 분석

Facing the changes in the macro environments, the Rho Tae-Woo administration had to do very difficult works at its onset. It had to retrench government organizations in some areas, but increase in others. However, the end results were no more than the bigger government than before and, curiously, the revamps came in 1989 and 1990 not 1988, the first year of the government. Specifically, only a few changes happened in 1989 and most revamps came in 1990. Even if these results can be explained from many viewpoints, this paper seeks the causes in macro-level environments, meso-level institutional contexts, and micro-level actors. It seems that the Rho administration intentionally didn't revamp the government organization in 1988 to avoid the dominant influences of the outgoing Chun administration. At the same time, it couldn’t find opportunities to revise the Government Organization Act because of the political situation in which the opposition parties tried to cleanse all the alleged problems of the former administration. In 1989, it had no choice but to revise the act by adding only a few trivial items to the bills that the opposition parties had proposed. They had to meet the strong demands of the opposition parties to a significant degree for its minority position in the national assembly and in order to pass other unsettled but crucial bills on political money, election, labor relations, and the public use of lands. In 1990, despite its super majority position in the national assembly, the Roh administration failed again to reform the government appropriately. The resistances of the interested forces and core actors’ weak will acted together to make the retrenchments of the government organizations impossible. Overall the reforms resulted in the increase of the government organizations.