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Testing legislative shirking in a new setting: the case of lame duck sessions in the Korean National Assembly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

Bon Sang Koo ,
Junseok Kim  and
Jun Young Choi
Bon Sang Koo
Affiliation:
Yonsei Institute for North Korean Studies, Korea
Junseok Kim
Affiliation:
Dongguk University, Korea
Jun Young Choi*
Affiliation:
Inha University, Korea
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper aims to test two types of legislative shirking in a new democracy, South Korea. Using the lame-duck sessions of the Korean National Assembly, we test whether a legislator shirks in voting participation and in voting decisions. We weave two competing motivations of legislative shirking in voting participation – that to secure more leisure time and that to utilize the last, valuable voting opportunity – into a synthetic hypothesis and test it with two-part hurdle models. To test a shirking in voting participation hypothesis, we analyze legislators’ choices on bills that are supposedly related to the interests of constituents or political parties. Empirical results strongly support our shirking in voting participation claims, while only partial evidence is found on shirking in voting decisions. The findings suggest that, besides the trade-off between labor and leisure, some legislators deem the lame-duck sessions an opportunity to express their own preferences unconstrained.

Keywords

Legislative shirkinglame-duck sessionstwo-part hurdle modelsthe Korean National Assembly
Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 33 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

†

Co-corresponding author.

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