Filipinos have tended to vote to the Senate leaders with diverse interests and ambitions, allowing that body to serve as a "tempering platform" where extreme views find a middle ground.

by Patricio N. Abinales

	Artwork by Arnold Beroya

WHEN it comes to elections, academics and opinion makers are often divided between those who see these exercises as rituals that defend the interests of the most undemocratic elements in society, and those who credit elections for deposing autocratic leaders and restoring the democratic "rules of the game." Political analyst Jennifer Franco, however, suggests a third option. In her exceptional-but-largely-unappreciated book, Campaigning for Democracy: Grassroots Citizenship Movements, Less-than-Democratic Elections and Regime Transition in the Philippines (2001), Franco argues that elections embody discrepant features: their corrupt and politically instrumentalist currents co-exist and sometimes even blend with more progressive and ethically-driven elements.

Elections are therefore not simply episodes in vote buying or intimidation; they are also occasions when reformists can gain the upper hand against entrenched patronage-driven or authoritarian opponents. These moments of transformative potential, Franco points out, are particularly prominent during periods of crisis in which elections are one of the means employed by contending forces.

The classic example that fits Franco's hypothesis is People Power I in 1986, where a variety of forces formed a broad alliance to support the candidacy of Corazon Aquino against Ferdinand Marcos. On both sides of the barricade, political instrumentalism and opportunism intermingled with progressive intentions. This dynamic was equally played out at the local level. In Franco's research area site, Cotabato province, a leftwing politician backed by the underground communist movement, the Roman Catholic Church, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens' groups was able to win a 1987 congressional seat against political clans rich in largesse and backed by their own "private armies."

Franco is not alone. Political scientist Benedict Kerklviet, in a 1996 essay titled "Contested Meanings of Elections in the Philippines," likewise notes that elections are not mere exercises where those with the "guns, goons and gold" are expected to win. Filipinos had in fact tried to make elections be "about legitimacy, fairness and democratic processes." Kerklviet cites a couple of cases where voter-organized volunteer movements "to keep watch over the polls in all precincts" have turned out "clean and honest elections." While these efforts may be limited cases, he says, they nevertheless reveal "people trying to preserve or create some integrity and honesty in elections and to turn them into expressions of actual sentiments or evaluations of candidates and issues." Kerklviet concludes: "In so trying, they engage and oppose those who have different, often sinister understandings of what elections are all about. From time to time, these conflicting views of elections burst onto the national scene as major confrontation."

FRANCO and Kerklviet anchor their reconsiderations on what U.S. political scientists call "periods of critical realignment," i.e., when electoral results signal a fundamental shift in either popular political preferences (from Democratic to Republican and vice-versa) or in the manner of governance (from a political system of states, courts, and parties, to a different one anchored on the powers of the federal government). But they need not limit themselves to these unusual (episodic?) conjunctures to prove their point. For in fact, even "normal" elections themselves are occasions where voters with discrepant but overlapping motives often send to the halls of power leaders with diverse interests and ambitions. The trend is particularly evident in the Senate, whose at-large members are elected in nationwide campaigns.

While conservatives may have dominated the Senate, Filipinos have also elected liberals, leftwing sympathizers, actors and comedians, orators, demagogues, and military officers frequently enough to pose a challenge to entrenched conservative elites. And while in other societies, some nationalists also turned out to be corrupt or opportunistic, the case histories of leading Filipino nationalist senators show, among other things, that they were voted to the Senate because of their perceived incorruptibility. Kerklviet writes that in a scan of the "landscape of national elected officials, one sees Senators Jose Diokno, Jovito Salonga, and Lorenzo Tañada, among others, whose campaigns, while not devoid of distasteful practices, were generally respectable and upright. These politicians attracted genuine support and enthusiasm for their stances on issues, their character, and their reputations as decent and fair public servants."

The politics inside the Senate have, in turn, come to reflect this diversity. Alongside blatantly interest-driven, reactionary, and frivolous laws passed by the chamber have been the most progressive ordinances of the country's legal system. Alongside laws that renamed streets after politicians or families, the Senate has also approved one of the most stringent regulations against rape and domestic abuse in Asia. Already the anti-rape law has sent a once-powerful northern Mindanao congressman to a two-life jail term. A family legal code contains some conservative provisions that represent the powerful influence of the Roman Catholic Church (anti-divorce), but it also includes provisos that strongly protect the rights of the child.

A chamber often dominated by men, the Senate, along with the House of Representatives, could pass laws against human trafficking and the violence against women. And while the country's legislature has generally sided with the president when it comes to maintaining the close alliance between the United States and the Philippines, the Senate had also shown remarkable independence at certain periods-it voted in 1991 to terminate the military bases agreement between the two countries despite the intense lobbying of then President Aquino for its retention.

More importantly, the Senate has functioned as a "tempering platform" where extreme and antagonistic political interests are compelled to find the middle ground in order to pass a law, define the parameters of a debate, or conduct a legislative inquiry. For a politician or reformist to succeed, he or she must learn how to scale down his or her objectives. The Senate represents voters' desire that their political representatives reach a middle ground to enable the country's politics to move forward. A leader who would continue to stand by his or her extremist political position (e.g., openly advocate the overthrow of the state either by radical revolution or the coup) generally never survived the electoral process. In the Senate, the radical is often compelled to learn the art of accommodation and negotiation with more conservative counterparts in order to prepare bills and pass laws.