Critical Perspectives on Politics and Development in the Philippines: Preface to Special Issue on the Philippines

Introduction

For some time now, we have wanted to publish a special issue on the Philippines. Most of the questions of development and social change that fall within the scope of the Journal of Developing Societies are clearly faced by the Republic of the Philippines (Republika ng Pilipinas). The essays in this special issue focus primarily on the politics of this important country, but they also touch upon enduring questions of sustainable development and social change. We hope this special issue stimulates many more contributions on the Philippines in the near future, so we can continue to give our readers more information and contribute to the existing body of critical knowledge on the Philippines.

The Philippines consists of an archipelago of more than 7,100 islands, which extend over an area of more than 1,000 miles from north to south (Cullinane, 2016). The largest and most populated islands are Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The capital city Manila and Quezon City, both part of Metro Manila, are on the island of Luzon and are the country’s two most-populated cities, although Davao City on Mindanao is a close third. The country has abundant natural resources and some of the world’s richest biodiversity. It covers an area of approximately 300,000 km² or 115,831 mi² (Geoba.se, 2016) and has a total population of more than 102 million, which grew by 5.2 percent in the first quarter of 2016 compared to 3.2 percent in the same period of 2015 (PSA, 2016b, p. H-2). It is the seventh most-populous country in Asia and the 12th most-populous country in the world.

Multiple ethnicities and languages are found throughout the Philippine islands. The Philippines has a rich multicultural history that has combined Austronesian, Asian, Islamic, European, and American influences. The aboriginal inhabitants of the islands were the Negritos, a term which refers to various people of dark skin and small stature, whose descendants are now a small percentage of the population (Boriaza, 2016, p. 2). They were followed by successive waves of Austronesian people. Contact with Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Islamic states occurred, and various states were established under the rule of Datus, rajahs, sultans, or Lakans. The majority of the contemporary population are of Malay descent and their distant ancestors came from the Southeast Asian mainland as well as from what is now Indonesia. Contemporary Filipino society consists of nearly 150 culturally and linguistically distinct ethnic groups (Hernandez, 2016, p. 2). There is also a minority community of mixed Filipino-Chinese descent, which is the result of the Philippines long history of contact with China.

The Philippines was conquered and colonized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. During the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, there was transpacific trade and cultural exchange with the Spanish–American colonies in Mexico and South America (Boriaza, 2016, p. 8). Spanish colonial rule ended in 1898, after 333 years and some 300 rebellions. Following the Spanish–American War in 1898, the Philippines became a colony of the United States. The insurgent Filipino forces that sought to create an independent republic were suppressed during the Philippine–American War which ended in 1902. The Philippines was a formal US colony until 1946, when the US government granted the Philippines formal independence. Following its formal independence in 1946, “the changing nature of the Philippines’ relations with the United States were a major theme in Philippine history for the first several decades” after the Second World War (Boriaza, 2016, p. 12). As a result of the formal education system established under US colonial hegemony, by 1939 approximately one-quarter of the population could speak English, and English has remained the predominant language of business, most government documents, and higher education since independence (Hernandez, 2016). Both Filipino (Tagalog) and English are the official languages of the Philippines, and at the regional level the respective regional languages are also official. Among households with members over 5 years old, 64 percent can speak English (PSA, 2005).

Since 2010, the Philippines has enjoyed rapid economic growth in terms of its gross domestic product (GDP), with an average growth rate of 6.3 percent between 2010 and 2014 (GOVPH, 2016). In 2015, the country’s GDP was $292 billion USD (FocusEconomics, 2016). Services are the largest sector of the Filipino economy, and this sector accounts for 57 percent of total GDP (Trading Economics, 2016). Within this sector, trade, repair of motor vehicles, and household goods account for 17 percent of total GDP; real estate, renting, and business activities account for 11 percent; transport, storage, and communication account for 8 percent; financial services account for 7 percent; and public administration, defense, and social security account for 4 percent. Industry is the second largest sector of the economy, which accounts for 31 percent of the GDP. Within this sector, manufacturing accounts for 22 percent of total GDP and construction accounts for 5 percent. The agriculture sector is the smallest sector and it accounts for the remaining 12 percent of the GDP.

The Philippines remains one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia despite its robust economic growth. More than one-quarter (26.3 percent) of the population were living below the poverty line in 2015 (PSA, 2016a). In accordance with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the government made a commitment to reduce by one-half the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty from 33.1 percent in 1991 to 16.6 percent by 2015. The subsistence incidence among Filipino families, or the proportion of Filipino families in extreme poverty, was estimated at 9.2 percent during the first semester of 2015. Thus, the Philippines achieved the MDG of halving extreme poverty, but it has not kept up with the poverty eradication efforts of the People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, and Thailand (GOVPH, 2016a, p. 19). According to a report of the Economist Intelligence Unit (reported in The Philippine Star, 2015), the Philippine economy continues to be “marked by wide inequalities of income, and great disparity between the richest and poorest households” as well as a lower GDP per capita of $2,843 USD (at market rates in 2014) than the majority of the region’s other major economies.

Because millions of people continue to live in poverty despite the economic growth of the economy, their precarious living conditions are vitally dependent on government spending on education, healthcare, and public transport. As the recent Economist Intelligence Unit report (The Philippine Star, 2015) mentioned above points the government provides cash transfers to poor families. These transfers of cash require parents to send their children to school and have regular health checks. This program has assisted many poor families and has also facilitated growth in the private consumption of people in the lower-income brackets in recent years. It is not sufficient to lift the poor out of their conditions of poverty, but it does enable some Filipinos to escape poverty through their access to education.

Philippine Politics

On May 9, 2016, Filipinos elected a new president, Rodrigo Duterte, the well-known mayor of Davao City. Duterte is the first Philippine president from the southern islands of the archipelago. Because of his controversial “profanity-laced campaign,” the tough-talking Duterte has been described as the “Donald Trump of the Philippines” (Liow, 2016). Duterte’s anti-establishment agenda and populist positions on poverty and corruption challenge the country’s entrenched oligarchy, which has long been an important fixture of the Philippine society, but his “law and order” neo-authoritarianism raises serious concerns about the extent to which his presidency will undermine the contemporary democratic regime in the Philippines.

The Philippines has been touted as a beacon of democracy in Southeast Asia since the late 1980s. Before the Arab Spring in the Middle East (2010–2012) and the “Reformasi” in Indonesia in 1998 that ended Suharto’s 32-year dictatorial rule (Hamid, 2014), the 1986 “EDSA People Power Revolution,” which brought down the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, has continued to inspire a widespread democratic image of the Philippines (Philippine History, 2016), such as the following:

The Philippines was praised worldwide in 1986, when the so-called bloodless revolution erupted, called EDSA People Power Revolution. February 25, 1986 marked a significant national event that has been engraved in the hearts and minds of every Filipino. This part of Philippine history gives us a strong sense of pride especially that other nations had attempted to emulate what we have shown the world of the true power of democracy.

The power of the people who assembled in Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) is justifiably credited with the restoration of democracy in the Philippines and the demise of the oppressive Marcos regime. But as the article by Salvador Santino Regilme Jr. argues in this issue, the consolidation of democracy in the Philippines has not been fully achieved.

The majority of the people in the Philippines have yet to see many economic benefits as a result of the country’s democratization (Liow, 2016). Following the EDSA People Power Revolution, the Philippine economy has continued to be plagued by corruption and incompetent leadership (Liow, 2016). For example, the lack of economic opportunity in the Philippines has driven many Filipina women—among the most highly educated in the world—to seek employment abroad as housemaids and domestic helpers, and the remittances from overseas workers now account for 10 percent of the GDP (Herrera, 2015). Many members of the growing educated middle class in the Philippines are frustrated with the limited prospects for economic opportunity and upward social mobility, and Duterte appears to have tapped into this frustration (Liow, 2016). Both Mark Thompson and Julio Teehankee call attention to this factor in their articles included in this issue.

Despite the economy’s significant growth over the last few years, under the administration of President Benigno Aquino III, the Philippines experienced a growing wealth disparity. If the new President Duterte wants to seriously address this problem, he “will have to leave behind his provincial mindset to govern at the national level, where these problems are amplified” and “he will have to deal with a rent-seeking culture and a powerful aristocracy that controls huge chunks of the economy” (Liow, 2016). Thus, it appears that it will take more than Duterte’s tough talk and neo-authoritarian populism to bring about a more equitable distribution of the country’s wealth and expand economic opportunity and social mobility for the frustrated Filipino middle class.

The Articles in This Issue

The first article in this special issue is entitled “Why Asia’s Oldest Democracy is Bound to Fail.” The author is Salvador Santino Regilme Jr., who is a political scientist at Northern Illinois University. He contends that despite having the earliest experience in electoral democracy in the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines has one of the least stable democracies in the Global South. Since the country’s return to democracy in 1986 after the EDSA People Power Revolution ended the Marcos dictatorship, he argues that the Philippines has not consolidated its democratic regime.

Regilme Jr. highlights the defective aspects of contemporary electoral democracy in Post-1986 Philippine politics. Without giving away too much of the cogent content of his article, it is suffice to say here that Regilme Jr. examines five key features of state–society relations in the Philippines: (a) the nature of the elite class; (b) electoral and representative politics; (c) civil society; (d) political economy; and (e) internal security. His article focuses on the balance of power in various sectors, where the interests of the state and non-state actors interact, and he analyzes the extent to which the balance of power between these interests reveals the prospects for a stable electoral democracy. His main theoretical argument is that a comprehensive empirical analysis of the quality of democracy in the Philippines requires disaggregating and analyzing the balance of power between the main interests involved in state–society relations.

The second article in this issue by Mark R. Thompson is on “The Moral Economy of Electoralism and the Rise of Populism in the Philippines and Thailand.” Thompson is the Director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) at the City University of Hong Kong. He compares the elites in the Philippines and Thailand, which he says tend to criticize the elections in these countries for being manipulated by corrupt politicians who engage in vote buying. However, Thompson contends that poor voters judge politicians according to the extent to which they fulfill their expected obligations to help the voters’ local communities. He argues that the disadvantaged population’s community-based, mutualist voting behavior can be understood as a “moral economy of electoralism.” Thompson says that this voting behavior was largely hidden from elite view when it was confined to the local level, but when populist politicians in the Philippines (Joseph E. Estrada) and Thailand (Thaksin Shinawatra) made national media-based appeals to poor voters, this pattern of voting behavior was exposed as a grave challenge to the dominant elitist narrative of good governance in both countries.

Thompson contends that community-based electoral behavior in both the Philippines and Thailand can be understood as a “moral economy of electoralism,” and he cites Anek (1996) who suggests that the “rural interpretation of democracy” is just as “legitimate and rational as that of the urban middle class.” Thus, the poor consider the politicians they vote for to be “good” if they “advance the reputation and prosperity of their villages” by bringing them resources from the center (Anek, 1996, p. 206). Thompson demonstrates how the electoral behavior of poor voters in Thailand and the Philippines is embedded within what in the Philippines are often called patron–client relations and “vote canvassing networks” (huakhanaen) in Thailand.

Thompson argues that poor voters typically put forward claims for economic security, a decent standard of living, and being respected, which parallels earlier demands (often backed up by a threat of rebellion) that have been historically associated with peasant politics in Southeast Asia. Thus, in the Philippines and Thailand, Thompson reveals how two radically different “tales of democracy” are told: (a) an elitist national narrative critiquing electoral “corruption” epitomized by vote buying and (b) a local view of elections in which politicians are judged according to the extent to which they provide benefits to the voters’ community and affirm poor people’s self-worth.

Thompson notes that “a new electoral twist in the Philippines occurred when Rodrigo Roa Duterte was elected president of the Philippines in the May 2016 election,” and he suggests that Duterte’s “law and order” neo-authoritarianism, while it was initially driven by middle-class support, involves a radicalization of reformism (sans liberalism) that appeals to Duterte’s cross-class electoral coalition, which is composed of the Philippines elite’s “reformists” and middle-class “neo-authoritarians.”

In a forward-looking article, entitled “Sustainable Philippine Cities and Habitat for the New Millennium,” the co-authors Andrea L. Santiago and Fernando Y. Roxas explore the creation of new towns as an approach to both poverty mitigation and urban development in Quezon province. They contend that an effective and creative means to decongest the highly dense and traffic-congested cities in the Philippines is to create new towns and cities that operate as environmentally sustainable economic units that draw people away from the big congested cities. Santiago and Roxas contend that in its simplest form, a sustainable city is an efficiently run city that is compact enough for people to move about without contributing to greenhouse gases and comfortable enough that their living spaces allow for privacy. These sustainable cities must utilize green energy and have sufficient economic activity, so that their growth sustains their population but does not degrade the natural environment.

They argue that there is an increasing pressure to make existing cities more sustainable, given the harsh realities of climate change. But they believe this is even more daunting for megacities in developing countries than in the more developed countries. One of the problems is that property developers continue to build high-rise office and residential condominiums as well as shopping malls without taking into account the additional stress this imposes on the road system and air quality. Santiago and Roxas review various strategies to create sustainable cities and then focus on the Philippine situation by identifying a particular site for the development of a new strategically planned sustainable city in General Nakar. Their article presents a holistic approach to designing this sustainable city, one that would not only reduce the negative impact of infrastructure development but also deal with the root cause of unsustainable development—the imbalance of wealth.

The last article in this issue is by a well-known Filipino political scientist Julio C. Teehankee, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at De La Salle University in Manila. His article is entitled “Weak State, Strong Presidents: Situating the Duterte Presidency in Philippine Political Time.” He argues that the Philippine presidency is the first and most durable in Asia. As a political institution, it has been given enough constitutional power to have the formal semblance of a “strong presidency” but not enough to totally control the strategic interests in Philippine society. Applying the concept of “political time,” Teehankee analyzes the rise of the republic’s 16th president, Rodrigo Duterte, within the historical context of the “cycle of presidential regimes” in the Philippines. Furthermore, he analyzes the nature of presidential power in the Philippines by identifying the strategic moments that lie between structural regimes and agential choices. His article also delineates how regime narratives emerge as the “governing scripts” that bind together a coalition of interests within a particular institutional context.

Teehankee contends that the unexpected election of Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte as the 16th president of the Philippines on May 9, 2016 signifies a major rupture in the liberal democratic regime reestablished 30 years earlier with the ouster of the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos. He suggests that the rise of Duterte has the potential to usher in a regime of neo-authoritarianism in the Philippines. He points out that neo-authoritarianism is a recent trend in countries that underwent a democratic transition in the 1980s and 1990s but have since then failed to consolidate their democratic gains. In this case, Teehankee suggests that Duterte may establish a “lite form of strongman rule that legitimizes itself by competing in elections” and generating mass support by exploiting popular issues and aspirations often through demagoguery.

Final Considerations

In what political and economic direction will the Philippines go under its newly elected president? This question is addressed in a recent article by Walden Bello (2016), a well-known Filipino political scientist, local and international political activist, a past and possible future member of the Philippine Congress, and co-founder of Focus on the Global South. In this article, Bello describes the recent election of President Rodrigo Duterte as follows: “a hapless elite, an angry electorate, and a brash front-runner with little regard for democratic norms.” He contends that Duterte, more by instinct rather than plan, has simply set fire to emotions that were already just below the surface of contemporary politics in the Philippines. He also argues that the Philippines has experienced an electoral insurgency and “we risk grossly misunderstanding its dynamics and direction, if we attribute its emergence to mass manipulation.” Rather, he believes “it is, simply put, a largely spontaneous electoral insurgency” based on “the anger, frustration, and resentment that [have] accumulated under a succession of corrupt or inept administrations dominated by competing dynasties” (Bello, 2016). Because of these conditions, Bello’s worst fear is that “social warfare may be on the agenda” and the country may “experience something akin to the Yellowshirt versus Redshirt conflict in Thailand in the years leading up to the military coup of 2014.”

To give us more perspective on the current situation, Julio Teehankee reminds us in his excellent article in this issue that “presidents shape regimes, as much as regimes shape presidents,” and that “a ‘regime change’ involves a rearrangement of institutional interactions, with the nature of the past regime dialectically influencing the formation of the new one.” Viewed in this context, Teehankee argues that “the electoral victory of Duterte was a repudiation of the failure of the second Aquino administration” and “that it remains to be seen whether Duterte will make true his neo-authoritarian campaign narrative and institute regime change.”

If so, will this regime change involve “a radicalization of reformism (sans liberalism)” along the lines suggested by Mark Thompson in his article, and will it prolong the continued failure of Asia’s oldest democracy to “guarantee truly emancipatory politics” and the consolidation of democracy, which Salvador Santino Regilme Jr. deftly analyzes in the lead article of this issue? And under the circumstances, what are the prospects for the development of the kind of sustainable new cities that Andrea Santiago and Fernando Roxas contend in their article are needed to mitigate poverty as well as reduce urban congestion and greenhouse gases in the Philippines and other countries throughout the Global South? These are some of the more important questions which the articles in this special issue on the Philippines raise.