An Exploratory Study on the Structure and the Particularities of Legislative Responsibility

This article is an exploratory discussion for practically realizing the legislative responsibility that legislators have to bear according to the Constitution, and aims to explore the structure and the particularities of legislative responsibility. Legislative responsibility can be defined as a comprehensive responsibility based on the obligations imposed on legislators by the Constitution. In order to explore the particularities of legislative responsibility, the basic structure and essence of legislative responsibility and the particularities of constitutional responsibility are examined preconditionally. Since there are legislative obligations that the Constitution imposes on the legislator, it can be said that legislative responsibility also exists. However, the particularities of the constitutional responsibility due to the constitutional characteristics and the particularities of the legislative responsibility due to the legislative characteristics act as a difficulty in realizing the legislative responsibility. In particular, the legislative responsibility is also limited because of the inability to impose unsatisfiable obligations on individual legislators who are fully exposed to the complexity of the external environment, and the normatively and factually impossibility of determining violations of legislative obligations. For this reason, in order to practically realize the legislative responsibility, it is necessary to preemptively reduce the risk of violation of the legislative obligations as much as possible. In other words, rather than ex post determining whether a specific legislative procedure or legislative output violates the legislative obligations, a preemptive mechanism should be prepared to minimize the risk of violating the legislative obligation in the course of the legislative process. This avoids leaving the legislative responsibility as a nominal responsibility or realizing it solely as a political responsibility by the people. A way to reduce the risk of violation of legislative obligations is, for example, to document and disclose all information and reasons on which individual legislators base their judgments when making legislative choices. This not only improves the political responsibility by the people, but can also function as a means for individual legislators to be exempted from the responsibility for violations of legislative obligations.