The Political Legislation Cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when legislators focus on voters’ welfare to be reelected. This paper verifies the theory on South Korean legislative production (1948–2016); it is the first test of the theory in a country undergoing a process of democratization, thus providing evidence relevant also for the conditional political cycles literature. Two insofar untested hypotheses are verified: 1) peaks of legislative production should increase with the degree of democracy; 2) as the party system and the mechanisms of legislative checks and balances develop, the PLC should become more evident in bills of legislative rather than executive’s initiative. A hurdle model estimated on both laws of parliamentary proposal and of government assignment lends empirical support to both hypotheses, with the noticeable feature that PLC in Korea appear more in the form of an upward trend than of pre-electoral peaks.

政治立法循环理论预测选举前期立法制作的高峰期，当时立法者关注选民的福利被重新选择。本文验证了韩国立法生产理论（1948-2016）；这是在一个正在经历民主化进程的国家对该理论的首次测试，从而为有条件的政治周期文献提供了相关证据。迄今为止，两个未经检验的假设得到验证：1）立法生产的高峰应该随着民主程度的增加而增加；2）随着党的体制和立法制衡机制的发展，PLC 应该在立法议案中变得更加明显，而不是行政的主动性。韩国的PLC以上升趋势的形式出现，而不是选举前的高峰。