Records of legislative activities in the National Assembly of Korea have been accumulated mainly in the form of official outputs such as minutes, bills, and reports. While this approach ensures procedural evidentiality, it is limited in capturing the ...
Records of legislative activities in the National Assembly of Korea have been accumulated mainly in the form of official outputs such as minutes, bills, and reports. While this approach ensures procedural evidentiality, it is limited in capturing the underlying motives of policy decisions, on-site experiences, and personal networks that drive political action. This study explores a theoretical and methodological framework for strengthening contextual information in legislative records by introducing life history methodology into archival description.
The analysis first examines why traditional archival principles, such as provenance and respect des fonds, are insufficient to fully reflect the multidimensional nature of legislative activities. It then proposes temporality, contextuality, and relationality—the core concepts of life history methodology—as complementary alternatives. In particular, the Life History Calendar (LHC) is presented as a key tool for reconstructing causal relationships in political behavior by structuring an individual’s life trajectory along a temporal axis.
The study proceeds with a comparative analysis of international cases. In the United Kingdom and the United States, authority control systems, archival repositories, and oral history programs are closely integrated to provide an infrastructure that enables comprehensive exploration of politicians’ lives and public activities. In contrast, a review of twenty Korean studies on legislative records reveals that only one adopts a life history approach, and that authority systems, archives, and oral history programs remain fragmented or insufficient.
For empirical analysis, an LHC-based comparative experiment is conducted using records related to Assemblyman Woo Won-shik from 1984 to 2005. When only official records are used, a seventeen-year temporal gap emerges, making it difficult to understand the background of policy formation. However, when personal records and oral testimonies are incorporated into an expanded LHC, the causal process linking the anti-incinerator movement in Sanggye-dong during the 1990s to Woo’s later expertise in environmental policy becomes clearly identifiable. This demonstrates that a life history approach can make a substantive contribution to restoring the contextual dimensions of legislative records.
Finally, the study proposes a model for a Korean-style integrated infrastructure centered on the National Assembly Archives, scheduled to open in 2026. The proposal includes: (1) establishing an authority ID system for legislators based on ISAAR(CPF) and RiC models to describe people, events, and relationships in a multidimensional manner; (2) collecting both official and personal records while forming a metadata-level cooperation network with private archives; (3) institutionalizing an oral history program grounded in life history methodology to conduct systematic interviews after the end of parliamentary terms; and (4) building an integrated search platform that enables chronological navigation of all records using authority IDs as common identifiers. To support these measures, the study also identifies legal and institutional tasks such as clarifying the enforcement decree of the National Assembly Archives Act, coordinating with personal data protection regulations, and standardizing metadata.
This study offers a conceptual framework for reconfiguring legislative records not merely as administrative outputs, but as a public narrative that reveals how political judgment and action are formed. Although exploratory in nature, it lays the groundwork for subsequent empirical research and institutional discussion ahead of the opening of the National Assembly Archives in 2026, contributing to the role of legislative records as historical evidence that supports democratic transparency and accountability.