• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.69-101
• /
• 2019

The purpose of this study is to verify that voting behavior of congressmen can vary depending on the different candidate selection methods of political parties. Specifically, this paper examines whether congressmen elected through a primary tend to deviate from the party line vote in the floor voting, compared to those who did not. As a result, it was founded that congressmen who went through competition of the primary are more likely to defect from the party line vote than who did not. This empirical evidence suggests that if the introduction of the open primary system is further expanded in the future, it may lead to weakening of party cohesion and reinforcing lawmakers' autonomy.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
• /
• v.24 no.1
• /
• pp.67-101
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this study is to examine the significant factors having an effect on voting behavior of legislators in the FTA ratification votes of the 18th and 19th National Assembly. The previous studies show that the ideology and party affiliation of lawmakers are the most important factors influencing voting decisions of legislators. The study investigates whether these factors plays a significant role in voting on the FTA ratification. Statistical results show three important findings. First of all, we expected that the influence of the party variable be the most important factor due to the strong discipline of the Korean party. However, the results show that the constituency-interest variable is the most influential factor in the all analyses. Likewise, the results show that the influence of ideology variables on voting behaviors is very strong even though its impact is different by cases and models. This indicates that in the analysis of the voting behaviors of legislators, it is necessary to examine the effect of ideological variables in depth and in various ways. In addition, the results reasonably suggest that the party variable be consistently important even though its statistical significance is not shown in some models. Because the study analyzes the voting on the free trade agreement(FTA) bill, the results may not be commonly applicable to other voting behavior of legislator. Likewise, there is a limit to discussing the general characteristics of lawmakers based on the analysis on the 5 FTA ratifications. Nevertheless, the finding of the study is very significant. This is because it comprehensively analyzed the factors having an influence on the voting behavior of the legislators on FTA ratifications submitted to the National Assembly steadily since the 16th National Assembly. In addition, the study is very meaningful because it analyzed the ideological variables of the legislators in various perspectives considering that it is not easy in measuring the ideology of the lawmakers.