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By Juan T. Gatbonton, Editorial Consultant
This early, it looks like we’ll have four to
five candidates contesting the 2010 presidential elections—and end
up with another minority president. Every semblance of the two-party
system has disappeared, and with it the relative stability resulting
from the alternation in power of the Nacionalistas and Liberals in
post-Independence politics.
The more optimistic observers had then thought
national politics would evolve along the American model—with the
Nacionalistas and Liberals differentiating ideologically and the
local factions that compose them becoming transformed into
conventional party chapters. But the pull of local loyalties is so
strong that our politics has reverted to its accustomed
factionalism.
Our parties as networks of mutual aid
European parties are made up typically of
common-interest groups belonging to distinct social classes—most
often capitalists and workers. Ours are coalitions of local factions
founded on mutual-aid relationships. They are focused less on class
interests than on the spoils of office. When they emerged—in
response to the American regime’s call for the first nationwide
elections (for the Philippine Assembly in 1907)—the first parties
were cobbled together from pre-existing local factions coalesced
into nationwide alliances.
In practice, representative government cannot be
anything but party government. Many of our political problems rise
from our lack of groupings able to think coherently of the national
interest. Not distinct parties but individual politicians are the
functional units of our political contests. And beyond their
obligation to deliver “pork-barrel” benefits to their
ward-leaders and constituencies, our politicians are responsible
only to themselves. They can pursue their self-interest without
inhibition.
Factionalism deprives even the presidency of
dependable backing in Congress. The checks and balances of
presidential government aggravate the ill effects of this extreme
dispersal of political power. Since the chief executive, the Senate
and the House, and the judiciary all have veto powers, national
policymaking depends on the lowest common denominator of agreement
among them. All too often, the result is gridlock.
Rise of new-style politicians
The first factions were made up of landed
families and their dependents, for whom municipal politics was only
one of a variety of competitive social activities that include
who’s to become hermano mayor at the town fiesta. Because of their
strong local roots, some of these factions—such as those of the
Ortegas of La Union and the Fuentebellas of Albay—have survived
for a full century.
In recent years, “new-style” factions have
also emerged. These are connected more by cash-doles and material
benefits than by the mutual loyalty generated by utang na loob. And
because votes are more and more exchanged for cash, election costs
(and corruption) are escalating. Even so, the new-style factions are
less and less able to deliver their followers’ votes to national
politicians.
In recent times, we’ve also been seeing the
rise of new-style politicians, who enter politics close to the
top—from careers in business, the professions, and the senior
bureaucracy. All the prospective candidates in 2010 are of this
type. Machine politicians have become too soiled in people’s eyes
even to aspire for national office.
The character of the electorate itself is
changing. Urban migrants newly separated from factional loyalties
are at the stage where they’re most attracted to movie stars,
star-athletes and TV personalities. Some have fallen from the
factional machines into the hands of new-style power brokers such as
the purveyors of the new charismatic and Pentecostal religions.
Meanwhile, returning overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) bring home
experiences of how well governments work in more-ordered societies.
Will a change in the system help?
This early, it seems easy to predict that 2010
will be won by the presidential candidate who succeeds in building a
relatively stable nationwide coalition of local
factions—particularly in the poorest provinces where authoritarian
enclaves persist and ethnic loyalties are strongest.
Our political parties are still too closely
associated with specific individuals or families. Only democratizing
mechanisms can institutionalize them—and enable them to outlast
specific leaders and represent broader interests and ideals.
Will a change in the system help? The Yale
political scientist Robert Dahl agrees that “the American system
is exceedingly complicated and probably would not work nearly as
well in any other country.” Certainly switching to the
parliamentary system will make it easier for us to encourage the
centralization of political power.
Its “confidence requirement” for the
legislative majority to continue governing creates a strong
incentive for the ruling party to maintain voting discipline. But
parliamentary government will not be a political cure-all.
It is unlikely to bridge quickly our social
cleavages that now vent themselves in mindless violence, separatism
and insurgency. Indeed it might only worsen our factional tendencies
and produce “revolving-door” governments, just as it did in
Italy after World War II.
Alternatively the factions might simply divide
among themselves oversight functions over specific industries—and
control of their flow of political donations—just as the factions
in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have done.
Notes and Comment appears fortnightly.
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