‘Democratic deficit’ hampers Aquino regime

(Concluded from Wednesday)

BACOLOD CITY—The critique of Philippine democracy, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, was presented at the Bacolod City conference of the Philippine Political Science Association, which was held close to the first-year anniversary of President Aquino’s inauguration only a month from now.

In assessing the shortfalls of the post-Edsa democracy,  Prof. Paul Hutchcroft of the Australian National University, the keynote speaker, observed that, “All democracies are in some sense a work in progress and all have birth defects.” Within this framework, the conference raked the meager accomplishments of the Aquino administration and his leadership style over the coals. The academics dissected the democracy that evolved from what has been glorified as the “people power revolution”—warts and mole. The Bacolod conference was a  field day for  stripping the myths that have surrounded Edsa 1 for 25 years.

The attack was led by the keynote address of Professor Hutchcroft. Focusing on the promise of the President’s inaugural address, “no more   patronage politics,” the keynote paper conceded that political leadership is “critically important,”  but it said good intentions alone were insufficient to deliver results.

“Good leadership is not brought to its full potential if it is not backed up by effective institutions, and good leadership does not sustain itself over time without effective institutions which, by definition,  if we go back to  (Samuel ) Huntington’s 1968 work, are characterized by capacity, coherence, autonomy, and adaptability,” the paper said. “Noynoy has an admirable sense of end goals, but I’m not sure that I understand how he can possibly achieve these goals by good leadership alone” (read, glib sloganeering).

“While this represents a major and very welcome shift in leadership goals, the actual achievements of these goals will require far more than a change in leadership or a shift in leadership styles,” the paper said. “An essential element of longer-term success will be concerted attention to reforming the Philippines’ increasingly beleaguered political institutions.

“The President needs an effective bureaucracy, something that Fidel Ramos recognized when he stated plainly, during his presidency, that the bureaucracy is the weak link in Philippine development. And the President needs an effective, coherent and well-institutionalized  party to sustain his goals into future years. This is something that few, if any, of his predecessors have given much attention to.”

The reference to Ramos’ leadership style is apt in underlining the contrast between his style and that of President Aquino’s. Ramos was never famous for his rhetorical eloquence. (There are few memorable and quotable passages in his speeches.) He drew a concrete program of tangible projects, backed by solid engineering studies, and put in a lot of homework on these plans. By contrast P-Noy shuns homework, giving more importance to the charisma of the democratic restoration legacy of his mother, hoping that his electoral mandate, tremendously helped by this aura of Edsa 1, would deliver results and perform miracles for him, based on wishful thinking.

While the paper recognized that no country in Asia “has more experience with democratic institutions than the Philippines,” it  said its democracy has suffered a “democratic deficit,” that has prevented it from delivering results. “The enormous need for responding to pent-up demands from below is accompanied by the incapacity of the country’s democratic institutions to do so with any degree of effectiveness,” the paper said. “The problems are manifested in the recurrent and dispiriting inability of democratic institutions to deliver the goods, specifically goods of a public character.”

In examining this disability, the paper used the power of patronage (the central theme of the paper) as the analytical framework to illuminate how patronage structures have hampered delivery of public services in Philippine democracy. The paper traces particular structures of patronage that have evolved across 110 years since the early American colonial period. The paper defined patronage as a  process that “involves the exchange of public benefits for political support or party advantage,” and is given out by politicians to “individual voters, campaign workers or contributors.”

According to the paper,  the strong presidency of modern Philippines began with the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, when President Manuel L. Quezon presided over a weak National Assembly and enjoyed largely uncontested executive authority, through skillful dispensing of government resources. Through patronage, now popularly called “pork barrel,” Quezon  was able to achieve considerable control over the Nacionalista Party members that dominated the one-house legislature. “Quezon centralized access to patronage and built what was arguably  the strongest political party in Philippine history,” said the paper. This experience contributed to a process termed “patronage-based state formation.”

This type of state formation “occurs within settings that lack strong political institutions, notably effective bureaucracies and/or well-institutionalized political parties.”  The Aquino government is hampered by this institutional “democratic deficit,” including the lack of a dominant party—in this case, his Liberal Party.

The paper argues any program of political reform designed to enhance capacity to deliver results should be based on strengthening support institutions, such as bureaucracies and party systems. Lacking these, the Aquino administration is destined to be a non-performing government— good only in rhetoric.