Elections and Democratization in the Philippines

Jennifer Franco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781136541919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 2001. This study shows how legitimate elections held under centralized authoritarian conditions before 1986, though not democratic, still contributed to democratization by creating the political space needed for democratic oppostion to arise.

Chapter 1: Elections and Democratization in the Philippines

OVERVIEW

This chapter provides the theoretical background to the study, beginning with an overview of the main contending views of regime transition and democratization in the literature. Despite their differences, it is argued, the two main contending views are linked by a shared tendency to assume that national regimes are essentially homogenous units, composed of a series of basically uniform subnational political arenas and thus devoid of diversity beyond national capitals. The erroneous assumption of homogeneity also ignores the ways in which subnational variation influences national politics. Evidence from Latin America is suggestive of the variable way in which subnational variation can shape national politics: in numerous countries there that underwent transitions away from dictatorship in the 1980s and 1990s, the establishment of national electoral institutions did not result in the establishment of political democracy’s minimum conditions systemwide. Instead, the result was a variety of regime types that now occupy a substantial gray area in between pure dictatorship and full-blown democracy. In this chapter, a four-part typology is offered that identifies four broadly distinct regime possibilities, highlighting differences in the nature of the institutional linkages between national political centers and subnational political arenas, and in the problem of exclusionary electoral practices. Finally, with this typology in mind, an alternative view of the two Philippine political transitions is laid out. Looking first at electoralism before 1986, and then at less-than-democratic district-level elections after 1986, the main arguments of the book regarding less-than-democratic elections and democratization are presented.

CONTENDING VIEWS OF REGIME TRANSITION AND DEMOCRATIZATION

Most contemporary discussions of regime transitions and democratization implicitly assume that national electoral competition alone is sufficient for political democracy. National electoral competition is often portrayed as necessarily promoting democratization by providing ordinary citizens the opportunity to reward (return) or punish (replace) top elected officials. This view of democracy follows Schumpeter (1942), who defined democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”¹ Emphasizing competitive elections as a political mechanism for choosing top leaders, and narrowing the scope of citizenship to voting in periodic elections, Schumpeter’s definition marked a major departure from existing views of democracy based on the notion of “rule by the people.”² He justified the move in part by claiming that the presence or absence of electoral competition was “a reasonably efficient criterion by which to distinguish democratic governments from others.”³ Drawing on Schumpeter’s now classic “empirical” or procedural formulation aimed ostensibly at accounting for how “actual democracies work,” most analysts of regime transition and democratization focus almost exclusively on the establishment of stable electoral institutions.

In doing so, contemporary procedural approaches to democratization usually end up taking democracy’s other minimum conditions for granted and ignoring the problem of persistent exclusionary electoral practices.⁴ Though theoretically diverse, the voluminous and still growing literature on democracy and democratization remains largely defined by this common thread. Comparativists may be “very far from agreeing upon any set of models capable of addressing the new democratic realities of the world system or of providing alternatives to the outdated body of literature on authoritarianism,” as Remmer (1995) contends.⁵ But the lack of consensus over a definition or explanation of democracy does not prevent some of the most prominent scholars from sharing the same overly-optimistic assumptions about the actual freeness and fairness of elections in post-authoritarian settings, and consequently, about the impact of less-than-free-and-fair elections on ongoing democratization processes. Ironically, as McClintock (1994) notes, “While scholars of democracy favor a procedural definition of democracy because the freedom and fairness of elections can be observed and tested, they have devoted very little effort to the actual assessment of freedom and fairness.”⁶

In his influential study of “third wave” democratization, for example, Huntington (1991) contends that only a procedural definition of democracy such as Schumpeter’s is capable of providing the “analytical precision and empirical referents” needed to understand the emergence and collapse of democratic regimes.⁷ For him, a political system is considered democratic “to the extent that its most powerful decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote.”⁸ A system is deemed undemocratic if opposition groups are denied effective access to the electoral process through legal fiat or coercive acts, curbs on independent news media, or manipulation of votes or vote counts. Democracy defined in this way, Huntington argues, “also implies the existence of those civil and political freedoms to speak, publish, assemble, and organize that are necessary to political debate and the conduct of electoral campaigns.”⁹ But looking further, his list of actual “third wave” democracies includes regimes that have held competitive elections at the national level and still fall far short of extending all of political democracy’s minimum conditions to all citizens system-wide, such as El Salvador, Guatemala and the Philippines.¹⁰ In other words, after implicitly establishing guaranteed respect for basic political rights, including freedom of expression and association, as the minimum threshold for democracy in theory, he reverts to using the mere presence of competitive national elections as his actual yardstick in practice.

In addition to Huntington’s internationally driven analysis, as well as other “globalist” accounts, other major contending explanations of regime change and democratization also emphasize national electoral competition as the “procedural minimum” for democracy as well.¹¹ These include the contingent choice approach pioneered by O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986) and Przeworski (1986), as well as Collier and Collier’s (1991) path-dependent historical approach. With many analysts accepting national electoral competition alone as the minimum threshold for democracy, constitutional structures, especially the differences between presidentialism and parliamentarism, have also received increased attention in the literature.¹² The same formula has also facilitated the growth of the more recent “dual transitions” literature as well.¹³

Despite their diversity, none of these approaches addresses the analytically distinct problem of how the competitive electorate is expanded to include the entire citizenry, considered here to be a minimum condition for democracy. Instead, the politics that takes place in national capitals is simply assumed to extend uniformly system-wide, and persistent patterns of authoritarianism treated as ad hoc exceptions. In the literature on regime transition and democratization in the Philippines, such an assumption is most clearly operative in Thompson’s (1995) recent study of the rise of elite opposition and fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s. Without examining their actual freeness and fairness, Thompson concludes that the country crossed the minimum threshold for democracy in 1987, the year that a new constitution was ratified and the first “free elections for major political offices” after Marcos were held.¹⁴

By contrast, many critics point to socially inequitable economic policies and non-participatory outcomes as proof that an electoral regime is not politically democratic. Introducing a collection of studies highlighting the cases of Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, Peru and Chile, Harding and Petras (1988) define democratization in terms of “the achievement of significant political and economic power by workers, peasants, women, Indians, black, and youths who constitute the vast majority.”¹⁵ They then assert that “profound social changes are necessary for the real and stable progress of democratization” in Latin America, in effect, a priori rendering a wide range of political activity, including unfair elections and the conflicts or “contentious politics” they may generate, meaningless in terms of the dynamics of movement toward democracy.¹⁶ Where pre-existing socioeconomic and political inequalities have survived the national transition to a competitive electoral regime, the entire political system is often assumed to be inherently undemocratic and consequently incapable of generating potentially democratizing challenges to it, and so unintended and unexpected movements toward political democracy are treated as ad hoc exceptions.

Similarly, Gills, Rocamora and Wilson (1993) introduce their collection with a critique of the “flawed liberal political forms” now established in much of the Third World. According to them, “formal democracy without social reform increases economic inequality and thereby intensifies unequal distribution of power in society,” such that “in the absence of progressive social reform the term ‘democracy’ is largely devoid of meaningful content.”¹⁷ Highlighting the cases of Guatemala, Argentina, South Korea and the Philippines, they argue that “domestic inequalities and the exigencies and strictures of global capital” have placed inherent limits on the extent to which national transitions to elected civilian regimes in these countries can be democratic.¹⁸ For the Philippine case in particular, Rocamora (1993) highlights the elite-dominated composition of the first post-dictatorship government coalition, and enumerates its failures to produce socially equitable economic policies and to broaden popular participation in national policymaking. He then concludes by saying that “the formal institutions of constitutional democracy are in place, but they are not only not democratic, they have often been used for anti-democratic ends.”¹⁹ Such a perspective clearly sets rigid analytic limits on the study of democratization by implying that movement forward in democratization is only possible in settings that are already more or less democratic.

Taken together, these two broadly contending views of regime transition in the literature offer a dichotomistic view of democratization via elections as either necessarily automatic or inherently impossible.²⁰ While the usual emphasis on the “mere presence” of elections alone glosses over the serious obstacles and takes for granted political democracy’s other minimum conditions, critics’ insistence on particular socioeconomic or partici patory outcomes glosses over the actual opportunities and takes for the granted the often difficult and contentious process of constructing political rights and freedoms for all citizens. But whether the emphasis is on elections for top officials or on specific socioeconomic and participatory outcomes, it is often formal appearance alone that guides analysts in characterizing the “democratic-ness” of national political systems. Such characterizations assume that national regimes are essentially homogeneous units. As O’Donnell (1993) points out, “Current theories of the state often make an assumption that recurs in current theories of democracy; that of a high degree of homogeneity in the scope, both territorial and functional, of the state and of the social order it supports.”²¹ This assumption risks overlooking the actual diversity of different political arenas beyond national capitals in terms of social and ethni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Elections and Democratization in the Philippines
• Chapter 2: The Colonial Era and its Political Legacies, 1565-1945
• Chapter 3: The Postwar Clientelist Electoral Regime, 1945-1972
• Chapter 4: The Institutionalization of Centralized Authoritarian Rule, 1972-1978
• Chapter 5: Elections and Democratization in the Marcos Era
• Chapter 6: Local Struggles and National Regime Transition
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Interviews
• Index