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Crisline G. Torres
To cite this article: Crisline G. Torres (2004) The Philippine Pro-Parliamentary Position and the
Comparative Constitutional Design Literature, Philippine Political Science Journal, 25:48, 55-78,
DOI: 10.1080/01154451.2004.9754257
Article views: 58
Download by: [University of the Philippines Diliman] Date: 15 March 2017, At: 05:46
Philippine Political Science Journal 25 (48) 2004
Crisline G. Torres*
• The author acknowledges the comments of two anonymous reviewers but assumes full
responsibility for the final manuscript.
55
The importance of this call is hard to overestimate. Because the shift to
parliamentarism involves basic changes in the form of government itself
affecting the way both its executive and legislative branches are constituted
and related to each other, this call is one of the most-if not the most-
fundamental and far-reaching issues in the constitutional reform agenda in
the Philippines. By necessitating a restructuring of the institutional architecture
of governance in the country, the call for a parliamentary form of government
has also served as a central justification why the 1987 Constitution, far
from needing only piecemeal amendments, needs to be replaced by an
altogether new constitution.
Instead, the most salient defenses offered against a shift are neither
theoretical nor conceptual but a host of conjunctural, cynical, cultural, and
"personality-not-the-system" arguments. The conjunctural argument is that
constitutional change for the Philippines is inappropriate at this time since it
will be too divisive for the country and too disruptive to the country's tasks
of addressing its political and economic problems. The cynical argument
zeroes in on the motives of the politician-proponents seeing the call as a
smokescreen to a power grab to perpetuate themselves in power or, in the
case of the Cha-cha 2 campaign led by House Speaker Jose De Venecia, to
catapult a politician to power. The cultural argument is that the Philippines'
highly personalistic political culture is not appropriate to the more
depersonalized political behavior associated with a parliamentary system.
The "personality-not-the-system" argument is that constitutional change is
not necessary since it is not the "system" that needs changing but the
personalities in the system. Largely left untouched is the theoretical and
conceptual validity of the claimed superiority of parliamentary over
presidential democracies. The opposition has therefore failed to confront
head-on many of the central arguments of the pro-parliamentary position
in the Philippines.
In view of this, it is high time to start the long overdue process of offering
a more systematic critical review of the pro-parliamentary position. It is also
high time to attempt to present the opposite side of the form-of-government
debate in the comparative constitutional design literature. For without the
Such a critical review might also show that instead of the research focus
on the principal, often ideal-typical, debate between presidential versus
Pro-Parliamentary Arguments
We want to put an end to paralysis and gridlock and the constant divisions
in the Philippine political system that have prevented us from catching up
with the economic tigers of Southeast Asia and created cycles of boom
and bust for the country.
-statement of House Speaker Jose De Venecia upon the approval of the House
Concurrent Resolution no. 16 on March 19, 2003 asking Congress to convene
as a constituent assembly to write a parliamentary constitution
Lijphart goes along with this view, but at the same time holds that this is
only part of the explanation. For him, 'the real problem is ... that
everyone-including the president, the public at large, and even political
scientists-feels that the president's claim (to legitimacy) is much stronger
than the legislature's. Consequently... the feeling of superior democratic
On the other hand, the legislative branch also feels that it cannot be
dictated upon by the executive since it too enjoys a direct mandate from the
electorate and in its collective capacity also represents the whole nation.
This in turn may give the executive a hard time to achieve the necessary
cooperation needed to push its policy agenda in the legislature, even in
situations when the executive has majority control of the legislature.
This problem becomes more acute in cases wherein the president does
not have majority control in the legislature. Since the president and legislators
are elected separately, presidential ism is especially prone to situations where
the executive and majority of the legislative members come from different,
even opposing, parties. (Abad 1997: 60) Where outright conflicts between
the two branches happen, these conflicts then degenerate into a prolonged
and unproductive gridlock or impasse since, and this is the crucial part of
Abad and Linz's argument, there is said to be no clear democratic mechanism
to resolve the conflicts.
Similarly, the fixed terms enjoyed by both the executive and legislative
branches also act as a disincentive for them to cooperate. Since the executive
has no power to dissolve the legislature nor the legislature the power to
dismiss the executive, except in the rare and tedious process of impeachment,
the guaranteed term of office of both branches leaves little room for them to
coordinate their action if only to stay in office. In short, each can ignore the
other without undermining the two branches' tenure. Accordingly, this set-
up results in frequent policy stalemates and gridlocks between the two
branches.
This point is shared by Abueva and Tangco who also believe that the
system of checks and balances has had serious adverse effects on the
executive-legislative relations in the Philippines. Abueva (2002: 79-80) opines
that the separation of powers and the checks and balances partly explain
not only the competition and conflict between the President and Congress
as they enact laws but also the frequent buck-passing between them as they
fail to enact much needed legislation. He argues that the result is that the
country has lagged behind the rest·of East Asia. Tangco (1995: 2), for his
part, argues that it is the system of checks and balances that "institutionalized
the hostility between the legislative and executive departments and resulted
in the gridlock that emasculate the government and render it weak and
ineffectual."
Lines of Counter-Arguments
They argue that where presidential powers are strong, meaning that the
presidents have significant powers to influence legislation such as veto
powers and decree powers, "the ability of the congress to debate, logroll,
and offer compromises on conflictual issues confronting the society is sharply
constrained. Instead, the presidency takes on enormous legislative
importance and the incumbent has formidable weapons with which to fine
tune legislation to fit his or her whims and limit consensus building in the
assembly." (Mainwaring and Shugart 1993: 14) In short, where the
president's legislative power is strong, his or her capacity to encroach upon
a larger arena of lawmaking deemed by legislators to be properly belonging
to the legislature becomes greater, hence, potentially exacerbating conflicts
with the legislative branch. On the other hand, when the presidential powers
are weaker, the opportunity to widen the areas where the president will seek
to arrive at compromises with the legislature on policymaking is enhanced.
Mainwaring and Shugart (1993: 14) point out that it is "probably no
accident" that presidential democracies that score "very high" in their system
of scoring presidential powers were the most problematic while those with
the lowest scores have been the most stable presidential systems.
On party discipline, Haggard says that the most important variable "is
the relative strength of the party leadership vis-a-vis the individual politician."
(Haggard 1997: 139) If there is strong party leadership, the prospect of
enforcing the party program becomes greater. Equally important, Haggard
(1997: 139) argues that party strength affects not only intra-party dynamics
but also the design of legislative institutions themselves: "Strong parties are
more likely to favor rules and institutions that further buttress party discipline,
such as strong oversight or control committees, extensive agenda-setting
These three features of the party system are largely determined not by
the form of government a country has but by its electoral system. According
to Haggard (1997: 145), "[e]lectoral rules that provide low barriers to
political entry encourage the fragmentation and polarization of the political
system, factors that make coordination difficult." For party discipline,
Haggard (1997: 139-141) sees the effects of the electoral system on at
least four electoral features, namely: (1) manner of candidate selection; (2)
control of the order of electoral tickets; (3) choice voters make whether
between parties or candidates; and (4) control of campaign finance. 11
Jose Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi say that when powerful
legislative committees exist in parliament, these committees make it difficult
to exercise executive control of the legislature. According to the two, this
fact has not been frequently acknowledged by pro-parliamentary scholars
who harp on the superior executive-legislative relations of parliamentary
forms because they seem to be stuck on the Westminster model as the
"prototype" parliamentary case. While the prototype nature of parliamentary
system applies to England, a different, more problematic picture of executive-
legislative relations emerges if other parliamentary systems are considered.
Implications
Conclusion
Notes
1
The first is the 1991 collection "Summary of Conference Proceedings: First National
Conference on Parliamentary Government" published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation
and the Local Government Development Foundation. The second is the 1997 book Shift
published by the Ateneo Center for Social Policy and Public Affairs and the Philippines-
Canada Human Resource Development Program. The third is the 2002 book Towards a
Federal Republic of the Philippines with o Parliamentary Government: A Reader published
by the Center for Social Policy and Governance of Kalayaan College.
2 1 could only find two published papers (to be differentiated from single-issue newspaper
commentaries) that have attempted to answer some of the arguments advanced by the pro-
parliamentary position as it relates to the 1987 Constitution. The first is the 1995 paper by
Jose Abuevo which does not really answerthe arguments advanced by parliamentarism but
is more a plea to give presidential ism a chance to work for about 12 more years from
1998 before shifting to a new form of government. In the meantime, he proposes important
electoral and political reforms that would strengthen the presidential form of government.
Calling the parliamentary position as "beguiling and seductive" but arguing that the present
constitution is "good and solid," Abueva himself later succumbs to parliamentarism's siren
song that by the year 2001, he has shifted gears and has joined the parliamentary call,
complete with a draft constitution based on a parliamentary government (and a federal
organization of the state) but to be enacted in 2010 (in line with his earlier 12-year plea).
He is therefore included by this paper as a porliomentoristo and would be reviewed as one.
See and compare his 1995 paper published as a four-part series in Today, "Proposals for
Changing the Constitution" (4-7 July) with his 2002 paper "Towards a Federal Republic of
the Philippines with a Parliamentary Government by 201 0" in Towards a Federal Republic
of the Philippines with o Parliamentary Government: A Reader, pp. 79-1 02 that introduced
his draft constitution.
References
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Democratic Consolidation and Institutional Reform." In Soliman Santos et al., Shift.
Quezon City: Ateneo Center for Social Policy and Public Affairs and the Philippines-
Canada Human Resource Development Program, pp. 48-86.
Abueva, Jose V. et al. (eds.) 2002. Towards a Federal Republic of the Philippines with a
Parliamentary Government: A Reader. Marikina City: Center for Social Policy and
Governance.
_ _ _ _ _ . 1995. "Let's Make our Presidential System Work." Today 4-7 July.
Cheibub, Jose Antonio and Fernando Limongi. 2002. "Democratic Institutions and Regime
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Haggard, Stephan and Robert Kaufman. 1995. The Political Economy of Democratic
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---:-:-::---' 1993. '~uan Linz, Presidential ism, and Democracy: A Critical Appraisal." Helen
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----::--,---· 2001. "The Never Ending Cha-Cha Beat: How Should Progressives Dance?"
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