• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.145-176
• /
• 2009

This paper introduces two concepts, specialization and representation, to evaluate activities of standing committees in Korean Assembly. Previous studies have criticized the committees based on frequent change of committee membership. After analyzing the empirical data of Finance and Economy Committee, it turns out that different from the previous arguments, the committee reaches the high level of activities in the perspective of specialization and representation. Changing of committee membership, after considering direction of the change and period of leaving the committee, is less happened than they are supposed. If voting by proxy or absentee voting were allowed, the frequency of the changing membership would be decreased. Study on Finance and Economy committee reveals that the extent of participation of the committee members is similar to the that of the floor meeting and that the number of participants and hours for each meeting display the characteristics of deliberative democracy of committee. Unanimous decisions outnumber majority ones. Therefore, this paper insists that standing committees in Korean Assembly works much better than what they have been criticized