Sturdy representative institutions result from years of practice. In the West, the vote alone was long limited by religious, race, ethnic, property, literacy and gender restrictions. Even Britain—the “Mother of Parliaments”—took 150 years to elect its first middle-class legislature.

But in Latin America, Asia and Africa, democracies arose overnight during the process of decolonization. The Makati guru Washington Sycip calls the Philippine variety—the earliest one installed in the post-World War II period—“a premature democracy.”

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