<![CDATA[Legislators perform three main functions: legislation, budgeting, and oversight. Of these, the legislative function is the most strategic because it produces the laws that govern the state, yet it remains problematic, as the many laws challenged before the Constitutional Court show. This study examined, normatively, the relationship between the legislative recruitment paradigm and the constitutionality of legislative products in Indonesia, rather than the empirical effects of recruitment. It addressed two questions: (1) what the paradigm and legal politics of legislative recruitment in Indonesia are and where their normative gaps lie, and (2) how this recruitment paradigm can be reconstructed to reconcile legislative authority with electoral legitimacy. This normative legal research used statutory, historical, and conceptual approaches, supported by a prescriptive analysis of secondary data on Constitutional Court judicial review cases. The results show that none of Indonesia’s election and political party laws requires legislative competence standards; these laws merely impose administrative requirements on prospective candidates. This condition correlates with the quality of legislative products. Between 2003 and 2025, the Constitutional Court registered 1,293 judicial review applications, of which 548 were granted. The approval ratio for Reform Era laws (44.5%) was higher than that for New Order (31.6%) and Old Order (32.6%) laws. Based on these findings, this study proposes the Integrative Legislative Recruitment Model Based on Legitimacy and Competence (ILCM) as a normative concept. The article contributes a normative reconstruction of legislative recruitment.]]>
