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By Juan T. Gatbonton, Editorial Consultant
We Filipinos tend to explain away our civic
problems as arising from some cultural failing. But often enough
they merely reflect structural defects in our political
institutions. Instead of bewailing our national situation, we should
attend to these specific flaws in the system and correct them.
Consider for instance how, 20 years after the
1987 Constitution was promulgated, its unintended consequences still
distort our political and economic incentive system.
In reaction to the country’s disastrous
experience under the only president ever to win a second term, the
post-Marcos Charter adopted the “no re-election” rule, to
prevent another strongman from emerging. Well and good; but in the
process the Charter also weakened the “accountability”
principle.
Perils of the single-term presidency
Accountability—the requirement that government
justify its actions to its citizens—is at bottom enforced by the
popular vote. By denying the president any chance of reelection, the
1987 Charter in effect also places him beyond the reach of popular
judgment. Hence, the post-Marcos president really has little
incentive to work for the public good—especially since in our
fractionalized political system he has no institutional party with a
continuing interest in electoral politics behind him.
Such a president’s policies may be challenged
in the Supreme Court. The contracts his administration makes may be
scrutinized endlessly by the Senate. He may even be crucified in the
media and condemned by civil society. But he can still do very much
as he pleases—because the only constitutional remedy of
impeachment is so hard to carry out, and people quite sensibly judge
“people-power” revolutions or military coups as often being
cures worse than the disease.
Even our police forces have shed much of their
obligation of accountability, since the 1987 Charter placed them
outside the authority of local governments.
Accountability being the only effective remedy
against political corruption, its lack may be responsible for the
public perception that corruption has reached its height during
these last years of the Arroyo administration. As the Yale scholar
Robert Dahl reminds us, only through free, fair—and
frequent—elections can citizens retain final control over the
public agenda.
Destruction of the two-party system
Even the term limits for representatives,
senators and local officials has ironically had the opposite effect.
Political patriarchs who “own” personalist factions simply get
their extended families to warm their seats every time they must
take leave from office.
Without meaning to, the 1987 Charter has induced
an assortment of wives, sons, and daughters—as well as brothers,
sisters, parents and even nephews and cousins—to enter politics as
well.
Destroying the two-party system
The 1987 Charter, in its idealistic effort to
create a “free and open party system,” also destroyed the
relative stability imposed by the alternation in power of the
Nacionalistas and Liberals in post-Independence politics.
Their electoral contests might have eventually
produced a genuine two-party system—with the parties
differentiating ideologically (as they were already beginning to do)
and the local factions becoming transformed into disciplined party
chapters.
This evolution strongman rule suspended and the
1987 Charter cut short.
Today’s Nacionalistas—heirs to Southeast
Asia’s oldest political grouping—might (as the joke goes) fit
companionably in one of our dachshund-like jeepneys. We’ve no
political grouping big enough—unified enough—to think coherently
of the national interest. Individual politicians have become the
functional units of our political struggles for power and the perks
of office. In the first post-Marcos presidential election in 1992,
seven candidates presented themselves. In 2010, we’re likely to
have four or five serious contenders. Obviously we’ll end up with
yet another minority President.
Our immediate political goal should be to
encourage party consolidation. This system of public financing for
mainstream parties that Speaker Jose de Venecia and Senator Edgardo
Angara have proposed should begin to do.
Other defects we should be looking at
There are many other problems we’ve lived with
for generations that we could resolve readily with some thought and
determination. For instance, we despair over the way we lag behind
our neighbors—after having led them all in the post-Independence
period. But this failing we owe largely to the protectionist
provisions we continue to enshrine in successive Constitutions since
1935. Not only has protectionism prevented foreign direct investment
from entering our country. It has also enabled successive
administrations to choose winners and losers through their control
of the system of incentives and disincentives that governed the
closed economy.
Increasing calls for a shift from the
presidential to the parliamentary system, too, we have not
considered seriously—although there is a great deal of sense in
the arguments its adherents offer. In the setting of our
fractionalized politics, the “rigidity” of the presidential
system—in which the President, the two houses of Congress and the
Supreme Court all hold veto powers—has resulted in a democracy of
stalemate that has compelled citizens, twice in the last 20 years,
to intervene directly in the representative process.
Editor’s note: Notes and comment appears
fortnightly in The Manila Times.
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