법률안의 발의와 심사 과정에서 국회의원들의 동기와 관심에 관한 연구 : 의원 역할 이론을 중심으로

The aim of this research is to investigate MPs’ attention in sponsoring and scrutiny of law bills in the National Assembly of South Korea. This research focuses on not only re-election motivation of MPs (argued by rational choice theory) but their role orientation as representatives (argued by normative institutionalism, especially by Michael Rush). MPs’ roles are classified as partisan role, constituency role, and scrutiny role by Rush (2001). This research modifies the classification as follows: constituency worker, party politician, and policy watchdog and entrepreneur. The analysis on the data from qualitative interview with committee staff members demonstrates that MPs give their attention to law bills related to their own constituency or relevant interest-group as well as law bills following the policy of their party. MPs may give their attention to law bills related to their own specialty or ideology. However, they give more attention to bills related to current-issues drawing attention of media, and they sponsor bills for performance evaluated by their own party or NGOs. Through this analysis, it can be said that MPs’ re-election motivation and the role orientation as representatives of their own constituency, interest-group, and party are important in sponsoring and scrutiny of law bills. This research concludes that the focus should be on how to make MPs as individual representatives scrutinize law bills following the collective interests of polity to improve the legislative process of private members’ bills. This research argues that incentives should be provided to MPs who scrutinize law bills to improve the legislative process.