The Arroyo Imbroglio in the Philippines

Several key elements of Philippine democracy can be traced to the U.S.-colonial era. 1 The first is patronage-infested political parties that rely heavily on pork-barrel public-works projects run through national legislators. Under U.S. governor-general William Howard Taft’s “policy of attraction,” which was intended to woo the landlord class away from the revolutionary struggle and toward collaboration with the United States, the economic elite of the Spanish-colonial era was transformed into a political-economic elite that continues to wield power today. Because representative institutions in the Philippines emerged before the creation of strong bureaucratic institutions, it was easy for patronage-hungry politicos to overwhelm the nascent administrative agencies of the colonial state. Taft liked to evoke images of New England–style deliberative democracy, but the end result is better thought of as a Philippine version of Tammany Hall.

Second, the colonial political system ensured exclusion of the masses and control by a national oligarchy nurtured by U.S. rule. The franchise was limited to a tiny electorate and did not begin to expand substantially until the late-colonial and early-postcolonial years. By this time, the dominance of the national oligarchy was so well-entrenched that challenges from below faced monumental odds.

A third major legacy is the provincial basis of national politics, as influential provincial elites thrived in the national arenas established by U.S. officials. Finally, the strong presidency of the modern Philippines began with the emergence of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, when President Manuel L. Quezon presided over a weak National Assembly and enjoyed largely uncontested executive authority.

These legacies were the foundations from which Philippine politics evolved after independence in 1946. Among the trends of the 1950s and the 1960s were the further expansion of suffrage, the emergence of charismatic appeals, a new prominence for the media, the expansion of civil society, enhanced presidential mobilization of the army and community-development agencies, and the increasing cost of elections. The genius of “cacique democracy,” as Benedict Anderson explains, was its capacity to rotate power at the top without effective participation of those below. 2 Ferdinand Marcos undermined the system of regular rotation, however, beginning in 1969 when he became the first postwar president to be reelected to a second term. Three years later, partly in an effort to skirt the two-term limit imposed by the 1935 Constitution, Marcos declared martial law. His personalistic, authoritarian rule, amply rewarded by successive U.S. presidents in exchange for continued unhampered access to U.S. military bases, endured for more than thirteen years until 1986.

When people power confronted Marcos’s tanks on the streets of Manila in February 1986, the Philippines became a beacon of hope for democrats around the world. As Corazon Aquino was propelled from grieving widow to democratic icon and the Philippines began its transition out of authoritarian rule, there was much to celebrate about the exuberance of the country’s democratic spirit. Opposition to Marcos had nurtured the growth of vibrant civil society organizations dedicated to promoting the interests of farmers, the urban poor, women, indigenous peoples, and others who had long been marginalized by the country’s political system. A new breed of investigative journalists, seemingly fearless in their desire to expose corruption, emerged after the country’s transition back to democracy. 3 Elections brought forth high turnouts and extensive civic involvement.

The country’s return to democratic structures, however, revealed many underlying problems. First, numerous coup attempts against the Aquino government demonstrated the difficulties of returning the military to the barracks after more than a decade of martial law. Second, the Maoist insurgency of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army continued in many parts of the archipelago, assisted by successive governments’ failures to address immense socioeconomic divides. In the Sulu archipelago and parts of the large, southern island of Mindanao, Muslim secessionists challenged the central government and demanded attention to their longstanding grievances. Third, the effective reinstatement of pre–martial law electoral and representative structures facilitated the restoration of the power of the old local clans, who dominated the newly convened legislature in Manila and used the new democratic dispensation as an opportunity to reinvigorate private armies that had been dismantled under Marcos. Fourth, while political parties expanded in number, they remain today nearly indistinguishable from one another in terms of programmatic and policy positions.