법률안명 분석을 통한 한국 국회의 의제 설정 연구: BERTopic 기반 가결･폐기 법률안 비교 분석

This study investigates the determinants of legislative success in the Korean National Assembly, focusing on whether policy content independently influences legislative outcomes beyond the political capacity of actors. Analyzing a corpus of 89,223 bills introduced between the 17th and 21st Assemblies, the study applies BERTopic, a state-of-the-art topic modeling technique, to map the macroscopic structure of legislative agendas. To ensure methodological rigor, outlier reduction techniques were employed to refine topic classification, followed by logistic regression analysis to verify causal relationships. The findings reveal that the Assembly concentrates its resources on managerial agendas centered on administrative and fiscal support. Crucially, even after controlling for actor variables, policy content significantly affected passage rates. Beneficial agendas such as public safety and agriculture showed a statistically higher probability of enactment (gate-opening), whereas conflict-laden agendas like labor relations and media regulation were systematically more likely to fail (gate-closing). These patterns demonstrate a mechanism of selective agenda-setting, suggesting that the Assembly functions as a gatekeeper that institutionalizes non-contentious issues while filtering out structural conflicts. By extending legislative effectiveness research from an actor-centric to a content-centric framework, this study provides empirical evidence of the institutional bias inherent in the Korean legislature.