地方議員の立法活動

―議員提出議案の実証分析―

抄録

In Japan, local legislators often seem inactive and redundant. In fact, they introduce much fewer bills than local governors. However, why don't these local legislators devote themselves to legislative activities, especially introduction of bills?
  Using the panel data of 47 Japanese prefectural assemblies from 1967 to 2006, this study investigates the determinants of bill introduction by local legislators. We mainly focus on the effect of political institutions: executive-legislative relations, parliamentary rules, and central-local relations via the party system. The results of Poisson and a negative binominal regression model with unconditional fixed effects show that parliamentary factions tend to introduce more bills in following situations: while opposing the governor, when the factions are large enough to introduce bills on their own, and when they don't have a close connection with the central government via the party system. These results imply that the institutional restrictions of local legislatures cause their legislators to be inactive in introducing bills.