Populist Threats and Democracy's Fate in Southeast Asia by William Case

Author:William Case [Case, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138348158
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Philippines: democracy’s slippage

Democracy was restored in the Philippines in 1986. But having been shaken episodically since, it has been left diminished. A modest puzzle thus derives from democracy’s persisting, despite its many maladies. In this case, though, contextual factors can provide much of the explanation for this ‘intermediate’ outcome. They include an ambiguous legacy of American colonial domination, a partly ‘unusable’ state bureaucracy, and comparatively low developmental levels. In addition, the military has grown fractious and, at times, internally rebellious, evinced by multiple coup attempts during the late-1980s. And political parties have never recovered the stable two-party dynamic that they once possessed, instead generating high levels of volatility.

What is more, many elites in the Philippines, while possessing institutional bases in the bureaucracy, judiciary, security forces, and political parties, have remained more vitally grounded in large landholdings and business conglomerates. External to, and more powerful than the state, these bases have enabled elites to engage in uniquely pernicious forms of ‘booty’ capitalism and predation (Hutchcroft 1998). Ferdinand Marcos adjusted this configuration during his tenure as president, moderately centralizing state power in order to shift monopoly concessions into the hands of a new set of favourites. But after his ouster, prior patterns of oligarchy were in many ways reconstituted (Anderson 1988, 28–29; Winters 2011: 206) – though without the earlier benefits of a hierarchically-ordered and professionally restrained military and a stable party system.

Democracy thus survives in the Philippines, but it limps. As contextual factors predict this outcome, however, need we add anything more to our explanation? To see, we revisit social structure, focusing on the significant, though limited scope that it cedes for populist mobilization. On the one hand, despite the country’s territorial dispersion and linguistic diversity, ethnic identification remains weaker in the Philippines than in Thailand and Indonesia. Ceteris paribus, this should free the rural poor for the class affiliation upon which populism depends. In addition, after Marcos’s demise, social inequalities were worsened by the liberalizing reforms undertaken by Fidel Ramos during his presidency in the mid-1990s (Montinola 1999: 130), increasing scope for material resentments. And very high rates of overseas migration have raised levels of national identity and awareness.

In these conditions, survey data gathered prior to a key presidential election in 1998 showed that indeed, the qualities most sought by voters were that candidates be ‘pro-poor’ and ‘approachable’ (Social Weather Stations 1997). Accordingly, Ramos, as incumbent, tried to advantage Jose de Venecia, his chosen successor, through a one-off redistributive pay-out. Specifically, he tapped the country’s Coco Fund, the revenues for which had been levied on coconut farmers during Marcos’s presidency, but were afterward sequestered by the courts (Case 1999: 475). Ramos ordered now that the fund release ‘livelihood loans’ to the rural poor, hoping that the gratitude he earned would shine on de Venecia.

On the other hand, the receptivity of the rural poor to populist appeals, though significant, is dampened. Amid a unique Philippine land tenure system, derived from distinctive historical legacies, many of the rural poor remain under the thumb of traditional landowners, as well as newer forms of political dynasts and clans.

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