12th Market Economy Colloquium: Status and Challenges of Legislator-Proposed Bills

12th Market Economy Colloquium

Date and Time: February 12, 2026, 11:00 a.m.

Venue: Pureun Hall

Topic: The Current State and Challenges of Member-Initiated Legislation

Presentation: Professor Yoonseok Jeong, Myongji College

Discussion: Yiseok Kim, President of the Market Economy System Research Institute; Giman Kim, Secretary General of the Citizens Forum for Better Regulation; Jaewook Ahn, Emeritus Professor at Kyung Hee University; Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE); Professor Yoonseok Jeong, Myongji College; Gwang yong Go, Policy Director of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE); and 8 others

The Current State and Challenges of Member-Initiated Legislation (Summary in Paragraph Form)

Professor Yoonseok Jeong, Myongji College

As the number of bills introduced by members of the National Assembly has risen sharply in recent years, the legislative structure of our National Assembly has expanded in quantitative terms but revealed a number of limitations in qualitative terms. Under the Constitution, both the government and members of the National Assembly are granted the right to submit bills, but in practice, member-initiated bills account for an overwhelmingly large share. Since the 17th National Assembly, the number of member-proposed bills has surged, and in recent Assemblies they have accounted for more than 90% of all bills, while the share of government bills has declined significantly. One reason cited for this gap is that bills submitted by the government must go through inter-ministerial consultation, fiscal review, and various impact assessments, whereas member-initiated bills can be introduced relatively easily without going through such procedures.

The problem is how many of these increased numbers of bills are actually being processed. While committee bills prepared at the committee level have a very high passage rate, the passage rate for bills introduced by individual lawmakers remains very low. In particular, in more recent National Assemblies, a significant share of member-initiated bills have failed to be processed within the legislative term and have been discarded automatically upon expiration of the term. In the 20th and 21st National Assemblies, about two-thirds of member-proposed bills were automatically scrapped without reaching any conclusion. This shows that many bills were either not adequately prepared, excessively duplicated similar bills, or exceeded the review capacity of the National Assembly.

Distortions surrounding legislative performance have also emerged. A single bill may have multiple co-sponsors, and while some lawmakers have put their names on thousands of bills, others have participated in very few, showing a wide disparity. This suggests that legislative activity may be drifting away from policy deliberation and toward performance competition centered on the “number of participations.” It is also repeatedly observed that, toward the end of a legislative term, approval and passage rates decline while the rate of automatic expiration rises sharply, suggesting that more bills are being introduced as political messaging rather than with a realistic prospect of enactment.

It is also concerning that a substantial share of these bills are regulatory in nature. Regulatory bills are policy tools that directly affect the public’s economic activities and daily lives, but when they are submitted in the form of member-initiated bills, they often do not undergo the kind of sufficient prior consultation or impact assessment required of government bills. As a result, the risk of unforeseen side effects or costs arising at the implementation stage also increases.

In the end, the current structure of member-initiated legislation has made the National Assembly one that “introduces many bills,” but it remains far from being a National Assembly that “processes bills efficiently and legislates responsibly.” As indiscriminate bill introduction increases, the review burden on the National Assembly grows, and the handling of bills that are truly important to the public’s lives may be delayed. What is needed now is improvement that goes beyond merely expanding the quantity of legislation and instead strengthens responsibility and deliberation from the bill-introduction stage onward.

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Original title: 제12회: 의원입법 현황과 과제

Author: Market Economy Colloquium

Date: 2026-02-12

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=collo&pn=1&idx=28605