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Thursday, August 8, 2019

Political aberration

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS         AUGUST 06, 2019

WE are probably the only country in the world where minority senators are assigned as committee chairs. And we would probably be the only country where the minority leader can technically be from the same party as the majority leader.

We see the anomaly of some members of the opposition Liberal Party (LP) being in the majority and some in the minority. Franklin Drilon from the LP is the Senate minority leader while fellow LP Ralph Recto is the Senate President Pro Tempore. This practically renders useless the role of political parties in deliberative bodies.

Ideally, political parties are aggregators of diverse public interests. By locating themselves along the ideological spectrum, they offer their candidates to the electorate through competing party platforms, from among which the voters choose. As such, and in a normal and ideal political world, it is an aberration for members of political parties to split and align with different legislative coalitions.

The role of a political party in Congress is to use their platforms as the basis from where to craft legislation. Elections produce majorities and minorities, which technically reflect the general sentiment of the electorate in relation to the platforms which were offered by the political parties. In multi-party systems, a coalition of parties are usually formed along those that may have some common ideological leanings or platforms of governance. It is therefore unnatural for a left-leaning political party to align with and be a coalition partner of right-wing parties.

When a party or coalition becomes a majority in a legislative body, it bears the burden of providing the direction of legislation along the framework of governance which it offered to the electorate. The minority assumes the duty of being the watchdog, and is expected to scrutinize and critically engage the bills proposed by the majority. It is in this context that committee chairs must come from the majority, since they should be in control of the flow of legislation.

When the majority in both houses of Congress is controlled by the same party as that of the Chief Executive, then the government is unified around the party platform. But when one or both Houses is or are in the hands of the political opposition, then we have a divided government. This becomes a more challenging scenario where there is always a potentially contentious relationships between the Executive and one or both houses of the legislature. This is when bipartisanship and compromise become necessary tools for government to move forward.

In parliamentary systems, a divided government does not emerge since it is inherent in the system that the executive and legislative functions are fused and not separate like that of the presidential system. But, it is possible that there is no single political party that on its own captures majority of the seats and hence a party has to rely on other parties to form a majority coalition. Coalition governments are also contentious as these require a lot of compromises to be made among the coalition partners, and any party disagreements within the ruling coalition can cause it to fall.

In both presidential and parliamentary systems, the role of ideologically grounded political parties with robust party discipline among its members is a source of political rationality. This is something that, unfortunately, is absent in Philippine politics. Except for some party-list political parties, most parties in our country are formed more for convenience than to carry a particular agenda and/or ideology. This is precisely why it is easy for politicians to jump from one political party to another even during the period of their incumbency. This is also why it is not much of an issue for some members of a party to belong to the majority and others to the minority. After all, aside from the fact that there is no ideological anchor that cements party loyalty, majorities and minorities are formed based on who voted for whom during the race for Senate President or House Speaker.

It is also the ease in changing political parties, when juxtaposed with the enormous power of the President to dispense patronage, either directly or indirectly through his lieutenants, that make it possible to have congressional supermajorities. Thus, the idea of a divided government becomes only a political fiction.

While some would lament this system as broken and problematic, others, including even some academics, would say that this is the system that works perfectly for us. After all, our politics is driven more by personalities, and not by ideological platforms. We gravitate to people that we trust, and not around the ideas of dead, white men. This is how we do our politics.

In this personalistic political landscape, however, what emerges is also a kind of politics that undermines the very principle of representative democracy. In the absence of strong party systems, and in view of the strong role of the personalistic affinities between voter and politician, the expectation that the latter should serve the interests of the former is negated. The party system is supposed to be the vehicle from where political contracts between voters and elected politicians are defined, and to which the latter would be held accountable. Without this, and with a highly personalistic view of politics, the voter’s adulation and affection towards politicians becomes the basis for what cements the link between them. In this scenario, the voter ends up becoming a resource for the politician and not the other way around. Far from serving the interests of citizens, it is now the latter that end up serving the interests of the former.

One can say that our system of supermajorities behind the president spares us from disruptive and debilitating political deadlocks. However, the absence of strong party systems, coupled with voters not demanding accountability from but instead serve the interests of their patrons as their loyal base, can weaken the system to check the acts of the executive.

https://www.manilatimes.net/political-aberration/595692/

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