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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Notes from Politik 9400

  • Political Parties, in spite of their numbers, are still ideologically indistinguishable, and politically impotent.
  • Elections are won by mostly on the basis of popularity, name recall, dole-outs, and patronage.
    • The regrettable truth is that the choice of national leaders through elections has less to do with governance ability or integrity, than with image-building prowess during the campaign period.
  • The idea of "Political Participation" has been reduced to voting, thus allowing the above mentioned mismatch to persist, and supporting the system's many contradictions.
  • Despite the changes introduced by the 1986 Constitutional Commission, great leverage and power is still vested in the person of the president. who holds vast discretionary prerogatives in policy making.
  • Caught in perennial transition are the key institutions such as the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, as well as the police and the military, which have all the undergone various upheavals since the post- Marcos shift from Dictatorship to Democracy.
  • Philippine political ills are partly the result of the mismatch between the Democratic order installed by American colonizers and the socio-economic structure inherited from Spain.

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