Abstract
The Philippines’ long democratic experience has been remarkably free of deeply politicized cleavages. Roman Catholicism as a hegemonic religion prevents religious polarization, ethnic identity fragmentation limits ethnic polarization, and weak parties forestall ideological or class polarization. Nevertheless, the country suffered a crisis of polarization during the short-lived Estrada presidency (1998–2001) and that of his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010). The severe conflict was a product of power maneuvers by anti-Estrada forces, followed by anti-Arroyo actors returning the favor, given her gross abuses of power. Echoing Machiavelli’s famous distinction, the conflict pitted Estrada’s popoli (the many) against Arroyo’s oligarchic grandi (the few). This Machiavellian conflict ended with an oligarchic reassertion of Madisonian democratic rule through the electoral victory of Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2010. We conclude the article by considering whether the populist challenge of current president Rodrigo Duterte (2016– ) might spark a similarly destabilizing conflict in the years to come.
For a diverse and sprawling archipelagic nation, the Philippines has long been remarkably free of deep political cleavages along class, religious, ethnic, or ideological lines. Though it is beset with a protracted Maoist-inspired communist insurgency and a Muslim secessionist movement in Mindanao, neither of these challenges has developed into polarized conflict in national politics. Unlike many of its counterparts in the postcolonial world, the Philippines’ social diversity has never led to inherent antagonism between major ethno-linguistic communities often considered to be raw material for polarization. Religious polarization was prevented after more than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule securely placed Roman Catholicism as the nation’s hegemonic religion (Gryzmala-Busse and Slater 2018). Its democratic regime—arguably Asia’s oldest—has always been ruled by rival political dynasties that prevent the development of mass-based and ideologically driven political parties. Despite widespread poverty and steep inequality, Philippine democracy has never polarized along class or left-right ideological lines. Nor did the Philippines’ one brutal experience with dictatorship for 21 years produce the kind of regime cleavage—an enduring divide between former opponents and proponents of the outgoing authoritarian regime—that can polarize young democracies. Rather than realizing the promise of people power after toppling the regime of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Corazon Aquino reinstalled the elitist and low-intensity democracy of the pre-Marcos years, and former authoritarian elites have remained comfortably in the fold (Gills and Rocamora 1992).
From a macro and comparative perspective, then, the Philippines stands out as a case where high social diversity and wrenching inequality have surprisingly coexisted with low political polarization. Social cleavages are not tempered in the political realm by their cross-cutting character; they are simply not the foundation for democratic competition. The lesson is that democratic transitions need not polarize a population into bitter warring camps defined by social cleavages, even when the social raw material for such polarization appears self-evident and democratic competition is deeply entrenched. But this is not to say that the Philippines has never suffered pernicious polarization. In this article, we take the absence of politicized formative rifts in the Philippines as a rare opportunity to trace polarized conflict to political instead of social foundations (Somer and McCoy, this volume).
Wherever social and economic explanations for a political dysfunction fail to pass muster, politics itself is usually the culprit. Our resolutely political account for pernicious polarization is grounded in our theory of the Machiavellian conflict. Inspired by the political realist’s seminal ideas in the Discourses, this kind of conflict emanates from the friction between the institutions dominated by the grandi (great/few) and the popoli (people/many). In polarizing regime crises, warring factions comprising both the elites and the masses fight over which democratic institutions should have the final say and who will command them. Instead of reflecting and representing deep-seated class antagonism, these polarizing conflicts are fueled by clashing preferences over which institutions of accountability—those fostering inclusion versus those striving to ensure constraint—should take priority in times when their sovereign powers and political roles come into direct conflict. In other words, both sides in a Machiavellian conflict combine elites and masses in cross-class coalitions, although the populist camp typically generates an advantage among the masses while oligarchic forces draw more heavily from upper and middle classes. What generates Machiavellian conflict is not polarization between elites and masses per se, but a power struggle between the followers of a directly elected leader who wishes to rule in plebiscitary fashion, and those siding with actors trying to block him with every institutional weapon in the democratic arsenal.
The next section lays the conceptual groundwork for our theory of Machiavellian conflict and specifies how it differs from what we call Madisonian conflict. In brief, both types of conflict center on perceived abuses of executive powers, but Madisonian conflicts do not pit one side with a decisive advantage among the popoli against the other. We then build empirically upon the conceptual foundations that underpin our notion of Machiavellian conflict through a case study of the Philippines during its “lost decade” of democracy, 2000–2010. Finally, we consider whether the populist challenge of current president Rodrigo Duterte might spark a similarly destabilizing Machiavellian conflict in the years to come.
Conceptual Foundations of Machiavellian Conflicts
Polarization can worsen through mechanisms and processes that are institutional rather than ideological or sociological (Slater and Arugay 2018). Simply put, polarization does not require poles. To shed light on why, we should first explain what we mean by oligarchy, populism, vertical accountability, and horizontal accountability.
Oligarchy is among the most essential concepts in political science—as essential, if not as often invoked, as democracy. Unlike recent research that “runs against the grain of ordinary usage and a mountain of scholarship in the social sciences” by defining oligarchy strictly as “the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors” (Winters 2011, 7–8), we return to a canonical definition of oligarchy as rule by the few in a manner that diminishes democracy. Yet we add new substance by portraying oligarchy as a type of regime in which vertical accountability is weaker than horizontal accountability. By vertical accountability, we mean inclusion of the populace. By horizontal accountability, we mean constraints against excessive concentrations of executive power. There is no good reason to argue that either type of accountability is more essential to democracy than the other. But there is also no good reason to believe that developing one kind of accountability will necessarily lead to the development of the other. Quite the contrary: elites who are enveloped in regular, routine relations of mutual constraint have less incentive to mobilize the masses than those who are coping with severe elite conflict, and elites who are able to mobilize the masses are especially likely to reject constraints imposed by elites who lack such popular appeal.
If the underdevelopment of inclusion spells oligarchy, the underdevelopment of constraints points toward populism. Jansen (2011) defines populism as “any sustained, large-scale political project that mobilizes ordinarily marginalized social sectors into publicly visible and contentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people” (p. 82). The concept thus nicely captures both a ravenous appetite for mass (vertical) inclusion and an intense distaste for elite (horizontal) constraints. Populism swings the sword of vertical accountability at oligarchs; oligarchy uses horizontal accountability as a shield against populists.
When oligarchs and populists clash over whether democracy depends more on including the masses or constraining the ruler, we call it a Machiavellian conflict. In his Discourses, a treatise about the life and death of republics, Machiavelli offered concrete institutional solutions to counter the natural tensions that arise from the proclivity of the grandi (the few) to dominate and oppress the popoli (the people). He also explained that the popoli express their desire not to be oppressed by insisting on protecting their liberty from the grandi. According to Machiavelli, the story of any democratic republic centers on the balance of power between these two camps, and political conflicts escalate when each side insists on its exclusive right to solely control democracy’s fate. Herein lies the key difference between Machiavellian and Madisonian conflicts. The latter represent a less severe sort of destabilization in which democracy polarizes over the proper use of presidential powers without leaving the fate of mass inclusion hanging in the balance.
Though we draw heavily on Machiavelli, we depart from his arguments in three interrelated ways. First, in our view, a Machiavellian conflict is a battle between potentially antagonistic blocs of diverse political actors and organizations instead of coherent socioeconomic classes. We veer away from the reductionist and deterministic power of class and instead focus on the forces that mold these blocs.
This brings us to our second point. In a Machiavellian conflict, the grandi and popoli are not neatly defined classes but instead cross-class or cross-sectoral political coalitions forged and mobilized by leaders who represent forces associated with either oligarchic constraint or populist inclusion. Rather than being driven purely by class cleavages, Machiavellian conflicts are politicized conflicts between constellations of political forces that represent mutually antagonistic visions of democracy. In other words, the grandi and popoli are just potential blocs. Somebody needs to do the politics to build them (De Leon, Desai, and Tugal 2015). Finally, a Machiavellian conflict transpires in competing institutions in which blocs emphasize their supreme legitimacy vis-à-vis other institutions. In a nutshell, a Machiavellian conflict features different blocs doing democracy in different ways, through different institutions.
In the case of the Philippines, a Machiavellian conflict between popoli-backed proponents of inclusion and grandi-led defenders of constraints occurred during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although the specter of regime collapse loomed large in this decade of “democratic careening” (Slater 2013), democracy survived and stabilized when oligarchs reestablished solid control over Philippine politics with the election of Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2010.
Machiavellian Conflict and Democratic Careening in the Philippines
The 1986 “people power” revolution that ousted Ferdinand Marcos appeared to be a major democratic breakthrough for the Philippines. The country’s nonviolent transition from a highly personalized authoritarian regime was a notable exception to democracy’s third wave, consisting mostly of changes through negotiated pacts or violent ruptures (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). True to form, the sultanistic nature of the Marcos dictatorship foreshadowed the revolutionary nature of the country’s democratic transition (Linz and Stepan 1996). But, unlike in Romania, Nicaragua, and Iran, the revolutionary overthrow of a sultanistic regime in the Philippines was nonviolent and lacked a clear ideological imprint (Schock 2005; Thompson 2004).
Political actors who espoused radical ideologies had little leverage, paving the way for an eclectic opposition coalition that centered on the leadership of widowed housewife turned opposition leader Corazon Aquino. How were she and her allies able to outmaneuver a powerful communist movement and an even more formidable military? As leader of the opposition and presidential contender, Aquino commanded the crowds gathered in Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) 1 and also had the support of civil society groups that formed after her husband’s assassination in 1983 (Thompson 1995). Her coalition of forces was also far more cohesive than the more ideologically inclined alternatives such as a factionalized military and an increasingly divided left movement (Lee 2009; Rocamora 1994). This source of legitimacy prevented communists and the military—the Philippines’ extreme left and extreme right poles—from grabbing power, since they both believed that Aquino could easily mobilize civil society against them (Boudreau 2009; Mendoza 2009). Democracy was not only the great compromise between a military junta and a socialist regime; it was the only familiar political framework acceptable for both Filipino elites and the masses. 2
Democratic compromise was facilitated by a lack of formative rifts splitting the Philippine citizenry into sharply divided camps. To some degree, such rifts are absent because Catholicism unifies the vast majority of the population, swamping more divisive potential lines of identification. As David Steinberg puts it, “Philippine nationalism, the Philippine identity, the Filipinos’ value system, and the economic and social fabric of the society are all directly linked to the Roman Catholic experience” (Steinberg 1982, 83). Churches with deep national influence tend not to lose their moral authority unless they pick sides in partisan battles, especially by siding with dictators when the public rises up to oppose them (Grzymala-Busse 2015). The Philippine Catholic Church made no such misstep (Youngblood 1990). Moreover, the Catholic-Muslim divide is irrelevant to national politics since the Muslim minority is too geographically peripheral and numerically overwhelmed to become a claimant or forge a cleavage at a national scale. The upshot is that identity politics in the Philippines is remarkably muted, despite the archipelago’s considerable ethnic and linguistic variety as well as its geographically fragmented populace.
While the Philippines’ historic lack of formative rifts augured a nonpolarized democracy, its mode of transition could easily have given rise to a regime cleavage between Marcos regime stalwarts and opposition leaders. The 1986 EDSA uprising ended authoritarian rule and restored democracy, but it also contained a revolutionary promise. Instead of being transformed into a catalyst for institution-building and deep democratization, however, people power started and ended in the streets. Aquino and her oligarchic political coalition further restored a “cacique democracy” (Anderson 1988), marred by elite dominance, patronage politics, and social injustice (Timberman 1991). Aquino’s successor, Fidel Ramos, prioritized political stability and economic progress over addressing the democratic deficits found in the Philippine political system (Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2003). For almost two decades, the Philippine political arena had no dominant majority party driven by ideology, ethnicity, or any other social cleavage. Just like it was before martial law, post-1986 democracy was defined by the personality of the president as the ultimate dispenser of patronage propped up by factions of a “wild” oligarchy unbounded by power-sharing pacts or shared norms (Quimpo 2015). However, the oligarchy generally lent support to the courts, the legislature, and other institutions of horizontal accountability. In addition, it did not overtly undermine the press, curtail civil liberties, or stifle civil society’s involvement in politics. But for the first decade-plus of restored democracy in the Philippines, oligarchy was the order of the day, and vertical accountability between the elected and the electors—in a word, inclusivity—was badly attenuated.
The rise of Estrada and the populist challenge
In 1998, Joseph Ejercito Estrada, a movie actor turned politician, was elected the 13th president of the Philippines, garnering 40 percent of the national vote. His victory invalidated the ever-reliable formula for winning the presidency—a strong and extensive political machinery and patronage network—by directly appealing to Filipino voters (Hedman 2001). In a state where parties are merely window dressing for political clans, Estrada challenged the oligarchy through a combination of sheer charisma and populist appeals that resonated among lower classes who formed more than 70 percent of the country’s population.
Estrada also defied the mold of a typical Philippine president. In the past, the Filipino electorate conventionally chose between candidates who were well-educated, morally upright, politically pedigreed, and affluent. His background and track record were belittled by the country’s upper classes but emphatically embraced by the poor masses. Intellectuals sympathetic to Estrada interpreted his rise as an indication that the grandi’s grip over the country’s politics was loosening (David 2001). Far from being a mere Marcos proxy seeking a return to exclusivist authoritarian rule, Estrada set his sights on redrawing the map of Philippine politics in a more deeply inclusivist democratic mold.
Estrada’s populist domineering and the grandi’s reaction
The newly elected president wasted no time, starting his administration by espousing proposals construed as highly contentious, unpopular, and potentially polarizing. For example, Estrada’s proposal to move Marcos’s body from a cemetery in Hawaii to the National Heroes Cemetery and bury him there with complete military honors was met with severe public criticism (Doronila 2001).
Further provoking his critics, the president flouted the idea of amending the 1987 Constitution. A product of the anti-dictatorship struggle, that charter largely represented the bare democratic consensus mostly shaped by the Filipino grandi. Estrada sought to eliminate the constitutional provisions protecting national patrimony by allowing foreigners to own land, extract resources, and compete equally with domestic business, a move that severely threatened oligarchic economic interests. Opposition quickly formed with the aid of civil society groups that rallied public opinion against the proposal. Declining approval ratings, accompanied by a massive mobilization of social forces led by former president Corazon Aquino, the Catholic Church, middle classes, and the political opposition, forced Estrada to scrap this project (Arugay 2004). These two instances highlight how Estrada’s legitimacy, which came from the marginalized sectors of Filipino society, was beginning to be challenged by the displaced members of the country’s postauthoritarian political establishment.
Populist leaders rarely maintain good relations with the media, though the media’s attention often fuels their rise to prominence. Estrada loved, and was loved by, the local press until it started running negative stories about him, featuring unflattering photos on front pages and relentless criticism. Scorned by a media largely owned by the grandi, Estrada waged war against members of the press by punishing them for unfavorable reportage that included exposés about government irregularities (Coronel 1999).
Estrada’s involvement in rent-seeking from illicit activities marked the peak of his executive domineering. He was allegedly receiving millions in kickbacks for allowing illegal gambling operations around the country (de Dios 2001). Opposition and civil society leaders used this allegation, made by the president’s former ally, Governor Luis Singson, as a rallying point to demand accountability. The resulting public outrage changed the populist leader’s fate for the worse.
Oligarchic reassertion and people power redux
The grandi-led coalition against Estrada was headed by political veterans from the 1986 People Power Revolution, such as Archbishop of Manila Jaime Cardinal Sin, considered the leader of the Catholic Church, and ex-president Corazon Aquino. These credible moral leaders revived the dormant and dispersed opposition led by Vice-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Previously weak and fragmented minority parties united to challenge Estrada’s legitimacy. The extent of Estrada’s alleged corruption also led some of his party mates to desert his coalition. All these factors contributed to a highly charged political atmosphere by October 2000, which some civil society groups used to their advantage. The formerly small anti-Estrada movement quickly swelled to a broad societal coalition (Arugay 2004). The stage was set for a confrontation between two blocs, with Estrada, the entire government apparatus, and his loyal mass supporters on one side; and Arroyo, middle-class civil society, Catholic groups, and progressive social movements on the other.
Estrada and Arroyo became the centripetal forces behind these two highly polarized blocs, neither of which was solely defined by an ideological, social, ethnic, religious, or class cleavage. Their first confrontation was in the streets of Manila, with each bloc occupying a major demonstration site. This instigated pendular mobilizations across the country.
The conflicting Arroyo and Estrada blocs competed for popular support. The Arroyo bloc, mostly comprising the country’s grandi, represented only one segment of the country’s dense and robust civil society. Estrada’s government successfully elicited support from other segments. In one major rally, Estrada gave a fiery speech in which he accused the elites of conspiring to unseat him but also promised to face the corruption charges against him at an appropriate time and venue.
In this regard, civil society itself was politically divided between the two blocs. Those who harbored more liberal visions of democracy supported by the oligarchy were pitted against a more grassroots but less organized segment of civil society aiming to protect the electoral mandate of a president they put in power. The Arroyo bloc had, at least momentarily, the upper hand in mobilization, but Estrada still had the full support of the military and other political institutions. The top brass of the armed forces continued to respect Estrada’s electoral mandate while recognizing that an emerging bloc of social and political actors was bent on challenging his legitimacy.
In Estrada’s view, he was a victim of the grandi’s penchant for opposing the people’s leadership choices. He reduced the brewing polarization to a question of class, albeit portrayed in populist rather than Marxist or left-right terms. But this oversimplified the Machiavellian conflict. The allegations of corruption focused on Estrada’s accumulation of wealth, real estate, and other assets for himself, his family, and cronies that could have been used instead to help his poor constituency. Estrada downplayed being subjected to horizontal accountability as he refused to address the allegations. In turn, he overemphasized his electoral mandate, presenting himself as the sole representative of the country’ popoli.
The rival mobilizations had historical resonance with the polarized conflict between the Marcos and Aquino blocs that ended in the 1986 People Power uprising. This time around, however, democracy was careening rather than being restored. Both sides saw the other bloc as the enemy of democracy and their own bloc as democracy’s saviors. Instead of class cleavages, the dichotomy centered on whose vision of democracy should triumph and which democratic institutions should prevail. In other words, Philippine democracy was deadlocked by two equally powerful political blocs insisting on their own version of democracy, with one skewed toward oligarchy while the other embraced populism (Slater and Arugay 2018).
These rival elite factions exaggerated a conflict that was likely not seen or felt across the country. An opinion survey conducted in October 2000 revealed that only 29 percent of the public thought Estrada should resign, while 44 percent believed he should remain in office (see Table 1).
Opinion on Whether Estrada Should Resign
For greater precision, net agreements (% Agree minus % Disagree) are first computed before figures are rounded off.
SOURCE: Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey conducted from October 26–30, 2000 (https://www.sws.org.ph/swsmain/artcldisppage/?artcsyscode=ART-20160105135957).
Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao are the country’s main island groups. RP: Republic of the Philippines (entire country); NCR: National Capital Region (NCR) (better known as Metro Manila).
The impasse in the streets led the Arroyo bloc, which had been increasing in density and strength by the day, to shift the site of struggle toward the country’s institutions of horizontal accountability. Presidential impeachment is the most important mechanism of horizontal accountability in Philippine democracy. The implosion of Estrada’s coalition in the House of Representatives paved the way for his impeachment and allowed the Senate to conduct a trial to determine whether the president was guilty of corruption.
The sheer stress and pernicious sociopolitical polarization engendered by the first ever presidential impeachment trial in Asia eventually led to institutional gridlock. The Senate, a twenty-four-member body, was itself polarized between Estrada and Arroyo factions, making it difficult to secure the two-thirds vote necessary to convict the president. The Filipino public patiently allowed this horizontal accountability mechanism to run its course until a critical point: when members of Estrada’s bloc among the senator-jurors suppressed important evidence that directly linked the president to corruption. The impeachment process immediately unraveled: the Senate president resigned, while the prosecution team abruptly left the court’s premises to show their common disgust. The resignation was a clear symbol of the breakdown of the impeachment process as the sole constitutional means to settle the Machiavellian conflict that had paralyzed the country (Doronila 2001).
The unraveling of the impeachment process showed that formal institutions designed to constrain executive power had failed within the context of a Machiavellian conflict. Both blocs, representing oligarchy and populism, respectively, mutually decided to withdraw from the only constitutional means of resolving the crisis. But rather than an outright military coup from the conservative right, a violent revolution by the communist left, or an autogolpe 3 by the incumbent government, the outcome followed a familiar path—a reinstatement of oligarchic-liberal order through people power (Thompson 2008).
Though led by social forces mainly drawn from the middle class, the second People Power uprising had a peculiarly eclectic class character (Rivera 2001), with significant representation from the organized segments of the poor and marginalized social sectors. Also, the popular outrage expressed in the demonstrations reverberated beyond “imperial Manila,” sending ripples of discontent around the archipelago (Reyes 2001). What it shared with its predecessor in 1986 was the organized and nonviolent character of the protests, which civil society leaders thought was necessary to get rid of Estrada. A breakout of violence could not only rob “people power” of its legitimacy, it might also give the government the necessary justification to disperse the crowd or, worse, declare martial law (Hernandez 2001).
Apart from the dramatic display of collective action, the Arroyo bloc, with the help of civil society figures, brokered a seemingly solid coup coalition with Estrada’s other political enemies, as well as with groups that had extensive links to the military and the judiciary. The armed forces and the Supreme Court are considered as historically powerful veto players in Philippine politics, and they proved to be critical chess pieces in an otherwise deadlocked game between the two poles. This extraconstitutional resolution to the Machiavellian conflict demonstrated how unelected veto players in Philippine politics can decisively shift the balance of power between oligarchic and populist forces in Philippine democracy.
The popoli’s backlash against the grandi’s coup
The January 2001 People Power revolt received praise at home but fierce criticism abroad. Many summarily judged Estrada’s overthrow to be a “popularly supported coup” conjured by political elites, the military, and opportunist business groups against a duly elected executive (Mydans 2000). Though this nonviolent upheaval was deemed extra-constitutional, the leadership change it occasioned did not result in a breakdown of the democratic regime. In the face of captured and feeble political institutions, Estrada’s opponents were seeking to restore the oligarchic liberal order through alternative means of seeking accountability (Arugay 2005).
Far from resolving political conflict, Estrada’s ouster subjected the country to further political instability. Rather than “re-equilibrating” Philippine democracy, it opened the floodgates for contentious politics, a crackdown on political freedoms, weak institutions, and a politicized military (Hutchcroft 2008).
Among the violent episodes in this drawn-out Machiavellian conflict between defenders of Philippine oligarchic democracy and counter-elite challengers with populist tendencies was a massive protest of pro-Estrada supporters in May 2001. Though their short-lived uprising was brutally repressed by the military, it displayed the mobilizational power of the Filipino popoli, who felt aggrieved when their elected president was extra-constitutionally removed by the grandi (Garrido 2008).
This mobilization aiming to restore Estrada to power was led by displaced political elites who alluded to the conspiratorial nature of the populist leader’s removal. From the popoli’s view, Estrada’s degrading treatment in the hands of the elites who toppled him compelled them to take action by reclaiming Philippine democracy in a way previously owned by the grandi: people power (Schaffer 2008).
The highly emotional nature of the protest turned the gathered crowd into an angry mob that stormed the presidential palace now occupied by Arroyo. With the backing of the armed forces, Arroyo deployed several thousand soldiers to protect her fragile government deficient in procedural legitimacy. A “state of rebellion” was officially declared, allowing for numerous warrantless arrests of members of the Estrada bloc who had incited the siege.
The violence revealed other variants of people power, whose narrative was dominated by its nonviolent version in 1986. Machiavelli’s claim in the Discourses that the popoli rise up when they feel aggrieved and oppressed proved true. And, though Estrada turned out to be an ineffective populist, this popular backlash represented resentment and longing for another vision of democracy previously untapped by the country’s grandi. For the masses who belonged to the Estrada bloc, his prosecution for corruption was an unfair and selective application of democratic accountability, since the deposed president was not the only corrupt politician in the country.
In a Machiavellian conflict, those representing populism also succumb to the pressures of elitist principles, as established in Michels’ iron law of oligarchy. 4 The Estrada bloc was at best another faction of elites who wanted to wrest power from the oligarchs who dominated Philippine politics. The pernicious polarization that started with Estrada’s populist challenge was not resolved by his removal. The extraconstitutional installation of Arroyo set off a series of events that intensified the conflict, emboldened all political actors, and further polarized the country around these hostile yet nonideological blocs. The collective action that aimed to restore Estrada also revealed the impurities associated with populist challenges. Because the challenger bloc lacked a coherent ideology or shared identity that could push for a meaningful alternative to oligarchic democracy, it also succumbed to the same elitist, undemocratic, and exclusionary features that fed into the resentment against Philippine democracy.
Oligarchic re-equilibration and Aquino’s electoral victory
In a Machiavellian conflict, blocs that center on personalities tend to implode, possibly leading to the creation of new blocs within the old ones. The fate of the precarious Arroyo bloc hung in the balance during the president’s attempt to gain electoral legitimacy during the 2004 presidential elections. In the end, Arroyo prevailed by a narrow margin in a bitter contest against a candidate who acted as Estrada’s political proxy.
This electoral polarization represented continued gridlock between the opposing Estrada and Arroyo forces. Shortly after the violent repression of a pro-Estrada riot, Filipinos went to the polls for the 2001 senate elections. The campaign leading to the elections mirrored the lingering political divide as Arroyo’s senatorial ticket (her party calling itself the People Power Coalition) went head to head against Estrada’s political bloc, known as Pwersa ng Masa (Force of the Masses). The election, considered to be a referendum on the legitimacy of Arroyo’s government, produced inconclusive results, as Estrada’s candidates, one of whom was his wife, won four of the thirteen slots.
The elections did not fully recalibrate to a pre-Estrada elite democracy in the Philippines. On the contrary, the Arroyo administration continued to stand on shaky political foundations after a damning electoral fraud scandal. The resignation of several cabinet officials further inflamed Arroyo’s crisis of authority, though it did not diffuse to other political institutions such as the military and the bureaucracy. Civil society, however, was unable to provide the mobilizational power to create a semblance of a new Machiavellian conflict. The extraconstitutional nature of Estrada’s removal dissuaded some of them from embarking on a similar initiative against Arroyo (Tolosa 2009).
Attempts to stoke a Machiavellian conflict by conjuring an anti-Arroyo bloc proved futile. Though hugely unpopular, her government was politically strategic in coopting the country’s weak institutions—military, legislature, civil society, church, judiciary, and bureaucracy. The anti-Arroyo coalition was best described as a hodgepodge of familiar forces that, for the most part, made strange bedfellows. It ultimately stagnated into a few disgruntled ex-Arroyo bloc members alongside the remnants of Estrada’s bloc. Once on opposite sides of the political fence, the pro-Estrada forces and those responsible for his downfall were now part of a movement unified by a narrow goal—the removal of the beleaguered president by means fair or foul. The unwieldy alliance lacked a consensus on two significant components: a feasible alternative to Arroyo and an acceptable means of leadership change (Rocamora 2007).
The fragmented opposition showed political weakness in its inability to impeach Arroyo. It also resorted to soliciting the support of some military generals, but that effort likewise failed. The last serious attempt to destabilize Arroyo, in February 2006, failed because civil society groups could not effectively recruit protest participants. The coalition was unable to persuade the poor masses who once belonged to Estrada’s popoli that this was also their fight. The drive to remove Arroyo appeared to be another intra-elite affair that had no direct value or consequence in the masses’ daily lives (Abinales and Amoroso 2006).
Like the patterns Bermeo (2003) observed in Latin America, the noisy protests merely reflected polarization among the elites that did not necessarily translate to the larger public. The popoli who chose to join any of the competing blocs seemed tired from the battles between factions of the country’s political class. The 2010 elections would constitute an oligarchic reconsolidation with the victory of former president Corazon Aquino’s firstborn, Benigno Simeon, as president, largely due to his political pedigree rather than his competence or track record.
Conclusion and Prospects for Polarization under Duterte
The Philippines’ long experience with democratic rule did not spare it from a decade of pernicious polarization at the turn of the century. This polarization was not driven by formative rifts along religious, social, or ethnic lines; nor did economic or ideological divides cleave the overwhelmingly Catholic country in two. Rather, democracy suffered a major setback when political conflict among warring elites led to mobilizations, institutional crises, and extraconstitutional attempts to transfer executive power. The period of 2000–2010 was a lost decade for Philippine democracy as it careened between outright collapse and successful consolidation. But unlike so many other polarized nations, the Philippines recalibrated its democracy after the grandi decisively triumphed with the election of one of Filipino oligarchy’s own as president in 2010.
With formative rifts absent in the Philippines’ long history as Asia’s oldest republic, political polarization could arise along such lines. Thus the Philippines defies conventional wisdom, because polarized conflict there was mainly elite-driven and devoid of identity cleavages. Instead, it was a conflict between more established oligarchic forces and a populist challenge that emanated from a disgruntled set of political elites. The oligarchy’s rejection of Estrada was the impetus for the Machiavellian conflict in which he used the popoli to rally against the grandi who deprived him of his rightful place in the country’s political landscape. Relying on unbridled majoritarian impulses, Estrada maximized executive prerogatives. This threatened the grandi, who threw everything in their liberal arsenal against the populist president. In the end, they had to again invoke people power, an extraconstitutional device that nonviolently deposed the president but opened the floodgates for pernicious polarization.
Estrada’s removal from power awoke the popoli, who mobilized for the leader’s re-installment and refused to grant his successor any modicum of legitimacy. When the anti-Estrada pole, led by Arroyo, imploded in 2004, the grandi found themselves at war with one another. In the attempt to oust Arroyo, the grandi tried to use the aggrieved popoli against her, but to no avail. The continuation of the Machiavellian conflict did not result in Arroyo’s removal, but her presidency will be best remembered as unstable, illegitimate, and less than democratic.
Thus in 2010, Philippine democracy returned to its oligarchic mold. But the previously dormant popoli’s consciousness was revived with Rodrigo Duterte’s ascension to the presidency in 2016. Considered a political maverick, this populist president has ruled without regard for checks on executive power, civil liberties, and other liberal instruments. His emphasis on law and order struck a chord among the Filipino majority, who blamed the oligarchic elite for the country’s poor governance. This has opened up the possibility that relations between Duterte and opposition elites will descend into a Machiavellian conflict in the future. Duterte’s government has already moved to undermine human rights and curb the powers of accountability institutions, including the removal of the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice. However, the possibility of pernicious polarization largely depends on the extent to which politics will be defined by Duterte’s hubris and the opposition’s impatience (Arugay 2017). So far, Duterte has not mobilized his popular constituency against his political opponents in a manner similar to other populist leaders such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. But if the grandi either cannot organize themselves in self-defense or cannot generate mass support to help them block the highly popular leader’s power grabs, Philippine democracy might not just careen as it did in the 2000s; this time, it might actually collapse.
Footnotes
Notes
Aries A. Arugay is an associate professor of political science and holds the One University of the Philippines Professorial Chair in Comparative Democratization. He is also co-convenor of the Strategic Studies Program, Center for Integrative and Development Studies, University of the Philippines.
Dan Slater is a professor of political science and the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies and director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan. He was previously a professor of political science and sociology for 12 years at the University of Chicago.