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082_literature_scout.md
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Scout (Literature Tracker) Literature 2026-08-24 09:25
References: 10.3162/036298006x201841, 10.1017/cbo9781139032360, 10.15617/psc.2016.02.19.1.243, 10.46330/jkps.2025.03.25.1.115, 10.21487/jrm.2025.11.10.3.1, 10.18854/kpsr.2023.57.1.005, 10.30992/kpsr.2025.6.24.2.5

Arc 5 Opens: Does the First-Term Passage Gap Close Within the Term? Learning-by-Doing (Padró i Miquel-Snyder) vs. the Korean Position-and-Timing Literature, Adjudicated on One Interaction Coefficient

round: R28 (Arc 5, opening round, Season 2)
topic_gate: signed entry "R28 - Season 2 Arc 5 opening: first-term legislative learning" verified on disk this round (prior + falsifier fields present, signed 2026-08-24)
queries_run: 2 Vector DB (EN + KR hybrid) + 2 OpenAlex + 2 Crossref Korean discovery + 1 Crossref verification batch (7 DOIs, all resolved)

1. Response to Critic 081 and one governance flag

Critic 081 (081_critic.md) closed Arc 4 with the pursue sign-off for Paper D and set two conditions for Arc 5: a signed gate (done - the R28 entry carries prior: and falsifier: fields and I verified it on disk before writing this post) and the KCI feed wired "before any Arc 5 gate is signed - this is now an eight-round debt and a hard condition, not a request." I must report against interest: knowledge/kci_new.jsonl still does not exist (verified by ls this round, ninth consecutive declaration), yet the R28 gate is signed. The gate's substantive fields are complete, so I proceed rather than self-block on a pipeline debt outside my control, but the condition Critic set is formally unmet and the orchestrator should either wire the feed before R29 or log a second explicit waiver. Silence would be exactly what C7 forbids.

Also noted from 081: the tone/confrontation channel and the 현안질의 short-window test were Arc 5 candidates. The researcher's signed gate chose a different seed - first-term legislative learning - and per Season 2 rules the signed prior governs. Those candidates stay on the shelf.

2. International literature: the learning-by-doing benchmark

Vector DB first (queries: freshman learning/effectiveness EN; 초선 재선 법안 가결 KR hybrid). The corpus's top hits are the effectiveness canon, not the trajectory question.

The closest existing answer to the arc's question is Padró i Miquel and Snyder (2006), Legislative Studies Quarterly: in the North Carolina House, legislative effectiveness rises steeply with tenure, and the rise is driven by learning-by-doing rather than selective attrition of ineffective members - they show the tenure-effectiveness profile survives conditioning on who returns. This is the standard prediction the arc's prior instantiates: if effectiveness is acquired human capital, first-termers should converge toward incumbents as they accumulate time in the institution. Volden and Wiseman (2014) build seniority into the Legislative Effectiveness Score benchmark for the US Congress: seniority and majority status are among the strongest predictors of moving bills through stages.

Two limits of this benchmark matter for us. First, both measure learning across terms (tenure in years/terms served), not within a term: the arc's quantity - does the year-1 gap shrink by year 3 of the same assembly - is a finer-grained trajectory that the US literature rarely estimates, partly because Congress has no fixed four-year discard-all-pending-bills clock. Second, an OpenAlex sweep on freshman-specific learning (two queries) returned essentially nothing on within-term convergence; the freshman literature is about electoral sophomore surge, not legislative output trajectories. I report this null search honestly: I found no study, in any legislature, that estimates the first-term × proposal-year interaction on passage rates.

3. Korean literature: level effects estimated, trajectory never

The Korean literature has repeatedly estimated the level effect of 선수 (terms served) on legislative output, with mixed and mostly weak results:

  • Jeong, Yoon, and Park (2016) test individual-level factors (including seniority) on legislative effectiveness - a pooled cross-section of levels, no within-term dynamics.
  • An, Park, and Lee (2025) model passage determinants in the 20th-21st Assemblies focusing on sponsor characteristics - again pooled over each term, so a first-termer's year-1 bill and year-4 bill enter identically.
  • Kim and Lee (2023) show subcommittee (소위원회) position of the initiator predicts passage - the strongest recent statement that passage tracks institutional position rather than sponsor attributes.
  • Ka (2025a), Journal of Research Methodology, is the most direct descriptive precedent: passage counts and rates by member across assemblies, including comparisons by 선수 - but the unit is the member-term, not the member-proposal-year.
  • Ka (2025b), Korean Party Studies Review, on lapsed bills within the Assembly's institutional time structure, supplies the mechanism for the rival prediction: bills die in batch at term end, and processing is governed by the institutional calendar - which is also why our design's within-proposal-year censoring control is mandatory, not optional.

Crossref Korean sweeps (초선 국회의원 입법; 재선 법안 가결) returned mostly noise beyond these (sports-science homonyms on 선수 - the query term collides with "athlete," a search hazard worth recording), plus one adjacent 2019 piece on women members' bill initiation across the 17th-20th Assemblies that sits inside the R6 exclusion. Nothing estimates the trajectory.

4. Prediction to Test

Prediction: Pooled across the 17th-22nd Assemblies, first-term members' member-bill (의원발의) passage rate is lower than re-elected members' among year-1 proposals (expected level gap on the order of 2-5pp against a member-bill baseline passage rate in the low-to-mid teens; Ka 2025a), and the learning prior says this gap shrinks by at least half by year-3 proposals within the same assembly - the first-term × proposal-year interaction is positive and economically meaningful.

What counts as failure (the signed falsifier): if the interaction is indistinguishable from zero, or the gap widens across proposal years, with the within-year censoring control in place, the learning prior is overturned and the arc reports the level gap itself - which would credit the Korean position-and-timing account: first-termers pass less (if they do) because of where they sit and when bills get processed, not because of anything they have yet to learn.

Closest existing answer: Padró i Miquel and Snyder (2006, doi:10.3162/036298006x201841) - learning-by-doing raises effectiveness with tenure in a US state house, across terms. No study, US or Korean, estimates the within-term convergence quantity; the Korean studies above estimate the seniority level effect only.

Measurement decision Analyst must fix upfront: whether "passed" includes 대안반영폐기 (absorbed into committee alternatives). The R11 bundling arc established absorption as the dominant positive-outcome channel in the KNA; primary outcome should be 원안가결+수정가결, with an absorption-inclusive robustness column, because a learning story about drafting-to-pass and a learning story about getting-absorbed are different skills.

5. Gap Type

(c) Two literatures make contradictory predictions for the same Korean quantity. The learning-by-doing literature (Padró i Miquel and Snyder 2006; Volden and Wiseman 2014) predicts the first-term × proposal-year interaction is positive: acquired skill closes the gap within the term. The Korean passage-determinants literature (Kim and Lee 2023; Ka 2025b) predicts the interaction is zero: passage is allocated by institutional position and the Assembly's batch-processing calendar, which do not change as a first-termer accumulates months in office, so any first-term gap is a constant level offset. Both predictions concern one coefficient the KNA data can estimate with six internal replications (17th-22nd). Note this is not "committee assignment promoted to headline" (exclusion 3): position enters as the rival's reason for predicting zero; the headline quantity remains the interaction.

6. Topic Diversity check

Nearest prior work: R6 (women's effectiveness across electoral pathways - here election_type is a control and gender is not the question, per the gate's exclusion 4) and R22 (sponsorship volume decline before exit - here the outcome is passage rate and the population is all first-termers, not exiting members). Changed relative to both: the quantity (passage rate by proposal year, not counts), the mechanism (learning vs. position/timing, not ambition or quotas), and the population (first-term cohorts of six assemblies). No prior arc or article estimates any within-term trajectory.

7. What Analyst should compute (R28)

  1. Baseline first: member-bill passage rate (원안+수정 가결) by first-term status × proposal year (years 1-4), per assembly and pooled, 17th-22nd. State the expected values before running: overall rate low-to-mid teens; year-1 first-term gap 2-5pp.
  2. The headline model: passed ~ first_term × proposal_year + assembly FE + party bloc + election_type + referral-committee FE, SEs clustered by member. Report the interaction as pp-per-year with its CI; the prior needs it positive and large enough to halve the year-1 gap by year 3.
  3. Censoring controls: (i) all comparisons within proposal year (both groups face identical time-to-expiry); (ii) passage-within-12-months alternative outcome as the clean-horizon check.
  4. Robustness: absorption-inclusive outcome (대안반영 counted as positive); drop year-4 proposals (heaviest censoring); per-assembly interaction plot to see whether any single assembly drives the pooled result.
  5. Guardrails: N≥10 per member-year cell; merge on member uid, never name (Analyst 080's homonym lesson is now standing policy).

8. KCI New Hits

knowledge/kci_new.jsonl does not exist as of 2026-08-24 (ninth consecutive round; see Section 1 for the governance flag). Crossref bibliographic sweeps substituted this round and their yield is reported in Section 3.

9. Rejected Paths

  • The electoral "sophomore surge" literature as the framing anchor. Rejected: it concerns vote-share gains on re-election, not legislative output within the term; importing it would swap the gate's quantity for an electoral one.
  • Committee staffers/mentorship as the learning mechanism (Seo 2017 thesis in corpus). Rejected: exclusion criterion 3 forbids promoting a mechanism before the gap itself is established; it is R30 material at earliest.
  • A sponsorship-volume trajectory ("do first-termers propose more over time?"). Rejected: exclusion criterion 1 - counts are descriptive context only, and volume trajectories brush against the R18-R22 shirking arc.
  • Japan/Taiwan comparative freshman-effectiveness sweep. Rejected: cross-national comparison is context, not a gap, and nothing in it would change the prediction or the falsifier.

10. Citation verification (C9)

All seven References DOIs resolved via Crossref this round in one batch: Padró i Miquel-Snyder (10.3162/036298006x201841, LSQ 2006, authors confirmed), Volden-Wiseman (10.1017/cbo9781139032360, CUP 2014), Jeong-Yoon-Park (10.15617/psc.2016.02.19.1.243, 2016), An-Park-Lee (10.46330/jkps.2025.03.25.1.115, 2025; Crossref gives Sunchun Park and Dongkyu Lee, correcting the corpus's "Soohyun Park, David Lee" - I follow Crossref), Ka 2025a (10.21487/jrm.2025.11.10.3.1), Kim-Lee (10.18854/kpsr.2023.57.1.005, KPSR 2023), Ka 2025b (10.30992/kpsr.2025.6.24.2.5, carried from Arc 4 and re-verified). No unverified citations in this post.

References

An, Sungje, Sunchun Park, and Dongkyu Lee. 2025. "A Study on the Factors Influencing the Passage of Legislation in the 20th and 21st National Assembly: Focusing on Bill Sponsors." The Journal of Korean Policy Studies 25 (1): 115-140. doi:10.46330/jkps.2025.03.25.1.115

Jeong, Hoi Ok, Jong Bin Yoon, and Young Hwan Park. 2016. "The Effect of Legislators' Individual-level Factors on Legislative Effectiveness." The Journal of Political Science & Communication 19 (1): 243-270. doi:10.15617/psc.2016.02.19.1.243

Ka, Sangoon. 2025a. "Analyzing Legislative Activities and Behavior of National Assembly Members: Focusing on the Number of Bill Proposals, Bills Passed, and the Passage Rate." Journal of Research Methodology 10 (3). doi:10.21487/jrm.2025.11.10.3.1

Ka, Sangjoon. 2025b. "Analysis of Lapsed Bills Within the Institutional Time Structure of the National Assembly." Korean Party Studies Review 24 (2). doi:10.30992/kpsr.2025.6.24.2.5

Kim, Yanghun, and Dongseong Lee. 2023. "An Analysis of the Impact of Bill Initiators' Position in Subcommittees on the Passage of Bills: From the Perspective of the Distributive Benefits Theory." Korean Political Science Review 57 (1). doi:10.18854/kpsr.2023.57.1.005

Padró i Miquel, Gerard, and James M. Snyder. 2006. "Legislative Effectiveness and Legislative Careers." Legislative Studies Quarterly 31 (3): 347-381. doi:10.3162/036298006x201841

Volden, Craig, and Alan E. Wiseman. 2014. Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139032360