Content area
Full text
Strong Patronage, Weak Parties: The Case for Electoral System Redesign in the Philippines. Edited by Paul D. Hutchcroft. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, Inc, 2019. Softcover: 209pp.
Efforts to change the Philippines' 1987 Constitution have been a recurring feature of that country's contemporary politics. Despite existing for more than three decades, the post-Marcos dictatorship charter has yet to be amended. Previous campaigns for revising the Constitution were often led by politicians with the support of academics and civil society activists. The persistent failure of Asia's oldest democracy to implement deep constitutional reforms has caused its politico-economic order to ossify and its democratization process to stagnate.
It is within this context that this timely project must be placed. Led by one of the world's experts in Philippine politics, Paul Hutchcroft, this edited volume seeks to shift the frame of the debate over amending the Constitution to a much-neglected aspect of institutional design: the electoral system. Roughly defined as the institutional mechanism that translates votes into seats or elected positions, the Philippine electoral system has been identified as the main factor behind the country's patronage-oriented and personalitydriven politics. Supported by the extensive literature on institutional design, this book argues that political reforms advanced by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte should not be monopolized by a single-minded focus on federalism, but should also include a serious consideration of redesigning the country's electoral system. This includes reviewing the mechanisms for electing the president and representatives of the two legislative chambers, as well as the regulation of political parties.
The ten-chapter volume can be divided into two main sections. The first half of the book discusses the various components of the country's electoral...