Philippine Politics

Possibilities and Problems in a Localist Democracy

Lynn White III

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138492332
• eBook ISBN: 9781317574217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Philippine political history, especially in the twentieth century, challenges the image of democratic evolution as serving the people, and does so in ways that reveal inadequately explored aspects of many democracies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century the Philippines has nonetheless shown gradual socioeconomic "progress".

This book provides an interpretive overview of Philippine politics, and takes full account of the importance of patriotic Philippine factors in making decisions about future political policies. It analyses whether regional and local politics have more importance than national politics in the Philippines. Discussing cultural traditions of patronism, it also examines how clan feuds localize the state and create strong local policies. These conflicts in turn make regional and family-run polities collectively stronger than the central state institution. The book goes on to explore elections in the Philippines, and in particular the ways in which politicians win democratic elections, the institutionalized role of public money in this process, and the role that media plays. Offering a new interpretive overview of Philippine progress over many decades, the author notes recent economic and political changes during the current century while also trying to advance ideas that might prove useful to Filipinos.

Presenting an in-depth analysis of the problems and possibilities of politics and society in the Philippines, the book will be of interest to those researching Southeast Asian Politics, Political History and Asian Society and Culture.

1 Local regimes

An introduction

Democracies are hopefully designed to “serve the people.” Liberal habits that tend to treat citizens as equals, if combined with electoral habits for choosing governors in national and local polities, are expected at least over long periods to become a self-reinforcing syndrome that promotes fairness. The democratic regime type also correlates internationally with high wages and entrepreneurial prosperity. There have, however, been sometime exceptions.

Philippine political history in the twentieth century challenged the rosy image of democratic evolution—and it did so in ways that reveal inadequately explored aspects of many democracies. This is a concern of Filipinos, not just of foreigners.¹ In the first decades of the twenty-first century the Philippines has nonetheless shown gradual socioeconomic “progress” as most people conceive such development. Many books about Philippine politics, especially those based on the era of President Ferdinand Marcos whose efforts at political centralization descended toward ineffective dictatorship, offer monotonic critiques of enduring political habits in the archipelago. Other books, often based on hopes after his demise, take the opposite tack, often showing either pan-gloss confidence about the country’s future or patriotic pride that suggest occult causes of happiness for Filipinos.

President Marcos’s propaganda from his 1965 democratic election to his 1986 downfall linked development and nationalism. So a “turn” of thought among many Philippine intellectuals has raised doubts about this linkage—albeit more doubts about development than about patriotism. As Resil Mojares has said, “Indeed, there is quite nothing like ‘progress’—with the confidence and cosmopolitanism it brings—more conducing to an ‘internationalizing’ scholarship.”² There is nonetheless evidence that most Filipinos really would like more progress in distributing both power and wealth.

The book in your hands argues that both the pessimist and optimist accounts, like both the patriotic and cosmopolitan accounts, are incomplete if they look at the Philippines as a well-unified political system. The main argument here is that the country includes many local polities, which are in conflict with each other and with “the state.” Traditions of political personalism are especially powerful on these islands. They support institutions that may be evaluated as either “bad” or “good.” However that assessment turns out, the rich variety of politics in the Philippines trumps any attempt to define it in terms that are either modernistic or patriotic, or sad or glad. It is necessary to look at many sizes of institutions and informal power networks, and at the ideas these have fostered. Local patronism of a non-entrepreneurial kind continues to affect this political economy, despite waves of progress such as became evident in the decade after 2005.

It is usual to begin studies of a nation’s politics with the central government, although that is barely a start on the subject in any country. What causes the Philippine state to be described by many scholars as weak relative to regional or local Philippine polities? In other countries, including some that have lower per-capita incomes, the ability of the central government to influence localities is greater. In some, such as China, surveyed popular trust of national leaders is combined with popular distrust of lesser cadres; but in the Philippines, democratic elections legitimate the local leaders. Weak states elsewhere have been explained by factors that are arguably inapplicable to the Philippines. Sharp ethnic or religious divisions, for example, have been said to account either for state weakness (as in Zaire/Congo at any period) or for state strength (as in Saddam’s Iraq, which contrasted with Maliki’s). Yet Filipinos, despite some relatively minor linguistic diversity, do not have such severe divisions. The Muslim–Christian split is exceptional, and it concerns a minority in just a part of far-south Mindanao. Philippine citizens’ sense of nationhood is certainly not below par.

A country’s large size is occasionally cited as a problem for governance, although this explanation may be challenged in many populous and relatively stable states (e.g., India). The Philippines, which now contains more than 100 million people, is among the dozen most populous nations on this planet. Its large size is neither a clear cause of political problems nor a clear advantage for the future.

Natural resource windfalls have sometimes been adduced to explain losses of public legitimacy in states ruled by kleptocrats. But the Philippines, despite fertile volcanic soil and plenty of sun for growing crops such as rice or sugar, has scant oil, gold, or diamonds. The “resource curse” may or may not explain authoritarian tendencies.³ Either way, the evidence for it on these islands is mostly missing. The geographical sites of Philippine resources are not concentrated, as are many sources of mineral wealth that finance elites in other countries.

Another explanation of unsatisfactory governance cites international “bad neighborhoods.” Several African and Middle Eastern states are weakened because of conflicts that slip over their borders from other countries (from Sudan to South Sudan or to Chad, from Rwanda and Burundi to Zaire, from Syria or Iraq to their neighbors). By a similar mechanism, Eastern European states may be developing better governance because of their European Union co-continentals. But the Philippines are islands. Some of the most reputed successful states on this planet, both authoritarian and democratic, are over adjacent seas in East Asia. This archipelago is not in a bad neighborhood.

Weak civil society is sometimes said to impede effective governance—but the Philippines has particularly strong traditions among electoral watchdogs, non-government organizations, investigative journalists and academics, clerics who express concern for the poor, and women’s groups (although this country like many others has few effective trade unions). Nonstate institutions form readily in the Philippines to advocate for citizens who are seen to be underrepresented in government. Sometimes, as in the 1986 presidential transition from Marcos or the 2001 transition from Estrada, “civil polities” have been crucial (along with soldiers) for changing the chief executive. Nonstate political organizations have not been weak, although many Filipinos have been surveyed to perceive that democracy does not do much of substance for “the people,” especially to raise their incomes.

Further often-cited causes of democratic unreliability are easier to document in the Philippines. Extensive violence and extensive poverty head this list of factors. Relatively frequent natural disasters, economic reliance on unstable international commodity prices, and legacies of colonial indirect rule contribute to Philippine problems. These factors can also be found in other weak states, although the Spanish and American bequests of frailty to Manila are particularly striking, as the next chapter will document. Comparisons with other countries can aid analysis of this book’s main practical question: What reforms would make Philippine democracy serve the people better? But comparisons allow so many different conclusions that it makes sense mainly to study the place in its own right. An aim here is to see what this country’s own trajectory can tell about modern governance elsewhere, not just what other nations’ experiences suggest about the Philippines.

In the most recently published overview of politics throughout Southeast Asia, Richard Robison notes “three main ideological and scholarly traditions.” The first he lists is “American political science … especially as this is constituted within modernization theory.” The second is “Political economy in the British and European tradition, especially … Marxist.” A third, which has actually not seen much application to the Philippines, is “Public choice/rational choice political economy and New Institutional Economics.”⁴ This book stands back from these somewhat fraught ideological-scholarly traditions, as from the rather abstract patriotic, elitist, and postmodern opposing ideologies that each of them has produced, to write about facts that anybody can observe in the history of the archipelago.⁵

Studies of the Philippine polity, and also of the economy, show a notable resilience of non-entrepreneurial localist patronism. Many scholars have documented the extent to which most local officials and judges outside Manila have been tools of family interests. Some of the clans have remained in regional power for generations. Studies of political clientelism have become controversial among some Philippine nationalist scholars.⁶ But these ideas organize too much evidence to justify dismissing them on any existentialist grounds, even for would-be patriotic reasons. The central state remains weak; and local power networks have remained strong, even though that situation is slowly changing.

Historians such as Marcelino Foronda or Norman Owen have documented the autonomy of local affairs in the Philippines more carefully than most other social scientists have done, although some political scientists and activists such as Resil Mojares and Joel Rocamora have also stressed the importance of place in Philippine affairs. They have tried to tell the stories of actors whose “stage was municipal or provincial, far from the national spotlight that focused on Rizal and Quezon.”⁷ Not just in a country of islands, local stories may be the main ones.

Lessons for democracies

The Philippines is procedurally democratic. Freedom of expression and other liberal norms are constitutionally enshrined, and they are often exercised. As in other democracies, the norm of liberty in stable eras tends to favor people who have wealth. For example, some journalists have asked, “Is the Philippine press free?” The standard joking answer is, “Yes, but it is not cheap.”⁸ Politicians there sometimes pay high prices for positive news coverage. Political and social NGOs flourish, as do chambers of commerce, and other “civil societies.” Such organizations are important for governance anywhere, but their modal traits affect its democratic quality.⁹ As Hutchcroft and Rocamora write, “No country in Asia has more experience with democratic institutions than the Philippines.”¹⁰ Yet the combination of voting and freedom for many decades did not generally serve the islands’ people as much as they (and foreigners) expected.

Elections in the archipelago are occasions for fiestas, like those on village saints’ days. Voter turnouts are much higher in the Philippines than in most democracies. Local races are often closely fought. Professionals—news anchors, movie stars, boxers, basketball players—join Congress along with representatives of famous political families (who now mostly have professional vocations too, often in law). Diverse Philippine elites do not all agree with each other on policies, of course; but a degree of formal courtesy can be documented among families of leaders who in the past have literally murdered each other. By contrast, surveys show a relative lack of trust among low-income Filipinos, rural farmers, and those who have scant education.¹¹

Especially in a few regions, such as Bulacan or Pampanga, there have also been decades-old nonstate traditions of civil society movements for fair voting, for social justice, and sometimes against patronism. These have produced slow results. It is possible to explore why patron–client relations often dominate Philippine politics—and why such networks are sometimes less salient. Ideals of “people power” have occasionally become important, even though most of the people, when surveyed, believe they lack much national power. Later chapters will explain factors that catalyze the choices of Philippine elites, local or central, to be reformist or traditional.

Some foreign writers have suggested that Philippine political culture is irrevocably stagnant. James Fallows controversially speculated long ago that a lack of substantive results for most citizens in this democratic polity arises from some defect of Philippine nationalism:¹²

When a country with extreme geographic, tribal, and social-class differences, like the Philippines, has only a weak offsetting sense of national unity, its public life does become the war of every man against every man…. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay … total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside.

Fallows is wrong about weak national identity in the Philippines, even if he is right about strong identification with smaller groups. He overstates “tribal” (as distinguished from local) tensions, and he implies that differences of wealth will readily be articulated in politics. His report of “total war” is wildly exaggerated. All politics involve conflict, not just in this country. Yet many Filipinos are also distressed by the extent of sociopolitical violence, and they seek ways to reduce it.

At the same time, when foreigners look at the Philippines, they may see social disasters that worry fewer Filipinos. In a 2001 survey, a sample within the country was asked, “If you were to consider your life in general these days, how happy or unhappy would you say you are, on the whole?” The results reported considerable bliss (very happy, 31 percent; fairly happy, 53 percent; not very happy, 12 percent; not at all happy, just 4 percent). Filipinos were also offered the proposition: “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”¹³ Apathy mixed with dissatisfaction in the responses: a plurality of 39 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, and another tepid 33 percent neither agreed nor disagreed. Much later, in 2013, a follow-up survey found that Filipinos’ “net personal optimism” and “net economic optimism” were both “very high.”¹⁴ Such polls have been repeated many times in earlier and later years, with similar results.

Few Filipinos thought they could affect national policy in Manila, but when they were asked, “How likely is it that you would be able to bring out some improvement in your local community?” a strong 64 percent in 2001 said this was “very or somewhat likely.” This may just have been naïveté in an attitude poll, but a popular sense of political efficacy in local politics is stronger than is any sense that people can affect the national government.

Advice to Filipinos from foreigners has been extensive and often unflattering. As Michael Pinches points out,

In a region of Tigers and Dragons, the Philippines has almost universally been portrayed as the exceptional failure, and has had to endure the label “sick man of Asia” as well as the condescending advice of regional leaders like Lee Kwan Yew.¹⁵

Urbanski called the Philippines a “non-substantive democracy.” Kikuchi called the society “uncrystallized.” McCoy and his colleagues produced ver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Local regimes: an introduction
• 2 Malay foundations and colonial semi-modernizations
• 3 Clan feuds localize political violence
• 4 Entrepreneurs as politicians
• 5 Marcos, failed centralization, and land from the tiller
• 6 Law of rule, power of separations
• 7 Populist rituals and elite reformism
• 8 Voting, pork, policy, and media
• 9 Corruption
• 10 PNoy, “Pacquiaos,” and Philippine progress
• References
• Index