지방의회 의정역량 강화를 위한 의정지원 제도 개선방안 : 대만과 일본의 의정활동 지원현황을 중심으로

Abstract

Local autonomy, which has been around for 30 years, has now become a part of living together with the residents’ welfare. In other words, it is a very up close system to residents. With the rapid increase in local affairs, a local assembly has to play a bigger role and has more responsibilities on its shoulders. Considering growing significance of local assembly, checking and monitoring the executive branch of the local assembly is required as it implements local autonomy guaranteed by the constitution as a representative of residents in its constituency. At the same time, its legislative activities have a great implications on promotion of residents welfare. In spite of the importance of local assemblies for local residents, it is not easy for assembly members to act in their politics mainly due to insufficient system and institution of supporting local assemblies. It is fortunate that the central government is willing to submit the revised bill to the National Assembly as a result of constant proposals and efforts made by members of local assemblies, such as the decentralization of local autonomy and transfer of the authority over personnel to local assemblies and so on. Local assemblies in Korea are still in its infancy, but we expect to see gradual changes in them. The purpose of this study is to examine the successful factors of foreign countries like Taiwan and Japan and review possibilities of introducing numerous systems or institutions into Korea, for example, the independence of authority over personnel, assigning aides to members, and association of supporters so as to find out improvement measures. Japan and Taiwan have systems providing financial support to members of local assembly and allow them to get financial help from support associations. Furthermore, the authority over personnel is given to the president of a local assembly. For Taiwan, a member of local assembly could hire around 6-8 aides, which is equivalent to the number of aides who a national assembly member could hire in Korea. Those aides do their own tasks such as making suggestion of legislation, accounting audit, making written or oral questions, providing services to their electors and so on. This paper suggests ways to overhaul and improve current local assembly system and presents reasons to introduce effective foreign system into Korea.