The federalism project in PH

My recent lecture as speaker at this year’s Jaime V. Ongpin Annual Memorial Lecture—named after a businessman who bravely fought the Marcos dictatorship when it was neither the popular nor the profitable thing to do at that time—assessed the federalism project in the Philippines using the institutional design literature of my discipline, political science.

In the lecture, I employed some of the biggest names of the literature to back my key arguments, including three scholars, Rein Taagepera, Adam Przeworski, and Jon Elster, who won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. The arguments that could be mobilized from the very best scholars of the literature are devastating for the federalism project and the overall charter change campaign in the Philippines.

I will mention only three points. First, there is far from a consensus on the claimed superiority of the federal to the unitary system of government. Second, the recommendation for existing democracies is to reform rather than to overhaul their unitary system of government. Third, a constituent assembly, which also functions as a legislative assembly and is riddled by vested interests, is a highly risky mode of overhauling a constitution.

For the review of the works by Filipino federalism advocates up to the time of Gloria Arroyo, I presented the 2007 book chapter “Federalism versus Autonomy in the Philippines” written by the Australian National University professor Ronald May. This chapter continues to be the best resource available on the topic.

May criticizes prominent Filipino advocates such as former University of the Philippines president Jose V. Abueva for their excessively optimistic assumptions on shifting to federalism that fly in the face of the country’s deeply flawed devolution and autonomy experience.

Damning for the local advocates, May declares that “it is difficult to avoid the impression that the advantages claimed for federal over unitary systems read more like statements of faith than reasoned arguments,” and argues that “the case for a federal system in the Philippines has yet to be established.”

Nearly a decade after May’s review, have Filipino believers in federalism finally developed some convincing explanation to justify the country’s shift from a unitary to a federal system of government?

If the arguments of the acknowledged intellectual leader of the current federalism campaign, former Senate president Aquilino Pimentel Jr., are used as an index, then the answer is they have not. The federalism position in the Philippines remains stuck where it was when May reviewed it: in a morass of wishful thinking.

Pimentel insists that his federalism proposal is not a panacea, but once reviewed, it does resemble one. For example, his assertion in his Aug. 4 commentary in the Inquirer that “the federal system will expand to the fullest extent possible the people’s power and authority to chart the course of their own destiny” reads more like a stunning incantation of supernatural powers attributed to a system of government than a real-world estimation of the possibilities and limitations of government institutions.

In that commentary, he did not even bother to offer empirical evidence or cite scholarly literature to support his local empowerment argument, perhaps holding it as a self-evident truth.

But this claim that federalism maximizes (or even just markedly improves) democratic performance at the local (or even national) level is actually controversial among scholars and has been severely challenged by the critical literature on federalism, such as the recent works of Daniel Treisman, Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson.

In a future commentary, I will discuss why the present federalism project under President Duterte and as articulated by Pimentel is even more worrisomely faith-based than the ones earlier criticized by May.

Gene Lacza Pilapil is an assistant professor of political science at the UP Diliman. His lecture on the federalism project in the Philippines is available at https://www.ateneo.edu/fifteenth-jvo-annual-memorial-lecture.