Do numbers matter? It depends. For those anxious to improve legislative efficiency, a DPP proposal to slim down the lawmaking body may prove inconclusive, analysts noted yesterday.
"I don't see a strong link between the number of lawmakers and the quality or efficiency of the legislature," said Wang Yeh-lih (王業立), who teaches political science at Tunghai University. "The US House of Representatives, with 435 members, is much more efficient than the 100-seat Senate."
He added that the now defunct Taiwan Provincial Assembly had only 79 members but was not more efficient than the 225-seat legislature.
To boost its showing in the year-end legislative elections, DPP lawmakers have proposed shrinking the legislature's size to 146, thereby saving state coffers NT$4.4 billion in salaries per year.
Currently, lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan represent 98,000 constituents each, many more than their counterparts in democratic countries such as Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Luxemburg, Norway and Italy, Wang noted.
"Only countries with a population of more than 100 million, such as Japan, the US and India maintain larger constituencies," he said.
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"It is the rules of the game more than anything else that need fixing," Kao said, branding the proposed downsizing of the domestic legislature as both irrelevant and impractical.
He noted that many lawmakers at home are prone to roguish behavior because their parties lack the leverage to discipline individual members.
"In European countries where party caucuses hold the key to legislation, a single parliamentarian cannot paralyze the entire legislature as has repeatedly taken place here," Kao said.
A smaller legislature even if desirable, the two scholars added, stands little chance of materializing in light of the difficulty involved in amending the Constitution after the virtual abolition of the National Assembly last year.
To trim the legislature, at least three-fourths of lawmakers have to pledge their support to a constitutional reform bill before it can be introduced to the public. It will then take another six months before an ad hoc assembly may be elected, through popular vote, to decide whether to approve the amendment.
"The painstaking process makes amending the Constitution very difficult, if not impossible," Kao said.
To enhance legislative efficiency, academics and politicians alike have suggested introducing a two-ballot system whereby voters would be asked to pick a candidate and a political party they favor in the election of lawmakers.
As the proposed system would subject both candidates and their political parties to popular suffrage, party leaders would be forced to exercise more caution in naming candidates vying for seats reserved for proportional representation, Wang said.
Since 1992, a certain number of legislative seats have been reserved for national constituency and overseas Chinese communities.
Those seats, accounting for 22 percent of the legislature, are distributed proportionally among parties which capture at least 5 percent of the total ballots nationwide.
"Under the present system, legislators elected through proportional representation have no electoral backing as the voters do not have a direct voice in their election," Wang argued.
Practically speaking, the two-ballot system is much easier to enact, as it does not require a constitutional amendment to take effect.
But curing "Black Gold" is another story. "Honestly, if the voters don't quit accepting vote-buying, no system can 100 percent weed out the black sheep from the legislature," Wang said.
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