The philippine presidency in Southeast Asian perspectiveimperiled and imperious presidents but not perilous presidentialismThompson, Mark R.

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Publication details:Thompson, M. R. (2018). The philippine presidency in Southeast Asian perspective: imperiled and imperiouspresidents but not perilous presidentialism. Contemporary Politics, 24(3), 325-345.https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2017.1413503

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Contemporary Politics

The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective: Imperiled and ImperiousPresidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

--Manuscript Draft--

Full Title: The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective: Imperiled and ImperiousPresidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

Manuscript Number: CCPO-2017-0096R1

Article Type: Special Issue

Keywords: Philippines, presidentialism, delegative democracy

Abstract: Among the neglected cases of presidential systems in Southeast Asia, the Philippinesis particularly interesting as the oldest in the region and as a 'pure' case ofpresidentialism which provides seemingly strong evidence for its 'perilousness'. 'Firstwave' presidentialism theory appears to explain how competing legitimacy claimsbetween a president and the legislature contributed to the downfall of a sittingpresident (Joseph E. Estrada in 2001). Yet, Philippine presidents have usuallydominated other branches of government. O'Donnell's concept of 'delegativedemocracy' helps elucidate the hegemonic position of Philippine presidents generallyand sheds light on the illiberally transgressive nature of the Marcos and Dutertepresidencies in particular. When these twin perils of imperiled and imperiouspresidents are examined regionally, however, striking parallels are apparent inparliamentary Thailand while the Indonesian case provides a contrasting example of arelatively stable presidential system.

Order of Authors: Mark Richard Thompson, PhD

Response to Reviewers: I made comments in a previous box, so here they are only summarized:-I changed the title as requested;-Marked the sub-titles in bold;-reduced the footnotes with text in them now only a third of what they were previously;-formatted the references according to the CP style sheet.

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1

The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective:

Imperiled and Imperious Presidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

Abstract (140 words)

Among the neglected cases of presidential systems in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is

particularly interesting as the oldest in the region and as a ‘pure’ case of presidentialism which

provides seemingly strong evidence for its ‘perilousness’. ‘First wave’ presidentialism theory

appears to explain how competing legitimacy claims between a president and the legislature

contributed to the downfall of a sitting president (Joseph E. Estrada in 2001). Yet, Philippine

presidents have usually dominated other branches of government. O’Donnell’s concept of

‘delegative democracy’ helps elucidate the hegemonic position of Philippine presidents generally

and sheds light on the illiberally transgressive nature of the Marcos and Duterte presidencies in

particular. When these twin perils of imperiled and imperious presidents are examined

regionally, however, striking parallels are apparent in parliamentary Thailand while the

Indonesian case provides a contrasting example of a relatively stable presidential system.

Key words – Philippines, presidentialism, delegative democracy

Bio note

Mark R. Thompson is professor and head, Department of Asian and International Studies (AIS),

as well as director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) at the City University of

Hong Kong. He is the author of The Anti-Marcos Struggle (1995), Democratic Revolutions

(2004), co-editor of Dynasties and Female Political Leaders in Asia (2013), and editor of/author

in a 2016 special issue on the early Duterte presidency for the Journal of Current Southeast

Asian Affairs. He is completing a co-authored book with Julio C. Teehankee about the Philippine

presidency.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Hong Kong government Research Grants Council, General

Research Grant number 9042600 and 9041939.

Manuscript - with author details

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The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective:

Imperiled and Imperious Presidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

Among the relatively neglected cases of presidential systems of government and their impact on

democratic stability in relevant Southeast Asia countries (exceptions are Bolongaita, 1995;

Fukuyama, Dressel, and Chang, 2005; Rüland, Jurgenmeyer, Nelson, and Ziegenhain, 2005;

Kasuya 2013), the Philippines is a particularly interesting one. It is the oldest presidential system

in Asia. The Philippines has had 16 presidents during five Republics and a Commonwealth

established under US ‘colonial democracy’ (Paredes 1989) and after independence (a period

marked by two electorally democratic and one dictatorial period): Emilio Aguinaldo, the

president of the revolutionary ‘Malolos republic’ government in 1899, Manuel Quezon chief

executive under the Commonwealth Constitution in 1935, two presidents during and

immediately after Japanese occupation of WWII (Second Republic), six presidents after

independence (Third Republic) and before Ferdinand E. Marcos’s declaration of martial law in

1972 which initiated a 14 year dictatorship (with a French-style semi-presidential façade in a

Fourth Republic), and six post-Marcos presidents during the Fifth Republic, with the current

president Rodrigo R. Duterte elected in May 2016.

It is also an example of ‘pure’ presidentialism characterized by a separately elected

president and congress with fixed terms and a strict institutional separation between the chief

executive and the legislature (Cheibub 2014; Stepan and Skach, 1993, 17-18), without features of

semi-presidentialism which involve a president ruling alongside a prime minister and cabinet

which are responsible to the legislature (Elgie 2011).

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This ‘purity’ makes it a good case to assess the explanatory power of the ‘perils of

presidentialism’ thesis. Two Philippine presidents were removed extra-constitutionally by

‘people power’ uprisings, Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 and Joseph E. Estrada in 2001 (with the

important difference that Marcos led an electoral authoritarian regime while Estrada was freely

and fairly elected). In addition, Marcos declared martial law in 1972, leading to the breakdown

of democracy while the current Philippine president, Rodrigo R. Duterte, has, as of this writing,

on several occasions threatened to declare martial law nationally (and has already done so in the

island of Mindanao) (Holmes and Thompson 2017). Moreover, both Corazon (‘Cory’) C. Aquino

(president from 1986 to1992) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (president from 2001 to 2010) faced

repeated coup attempts by disgruntled military elements backed by key politicians and leaders in

‘civil society’.

Presidentialism can be seen as ‘perilous’ to the Philippines’ democratic stability in two

ways. On the one hand, there was an important case of deadlock between the legislature and the

chief executive that contributed to the extra-constitutional removal of Estrada in 2001. Yet such

an impasse between the legislative and executive branches has been the exception in the

Philippine context where patronage controlled by the president usually insures strong

congressional majorities for the incumbent. This points to another aspect of presidentialism to be

found at the opposite end of the spectrum of ‘perilousness’. Rather than being stymied by the

legislature with competing legitimacy claims leading to political crisis, instability, and

breakdown, presidents with massive formal and informal powers in the Philippines have usually

been able to subordinate the other two branches government, creating the danger of ‘elected

autocracy’ or even outright dictatorship. This peril can be seen to have contributed to Marcos’

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declaration of martial law in 1972 and has also been flagged as a danger during Duterte’s early

presidency (Thompson 2016a).

The two perils can be seen as related to what Guillermo O’Donnell has dubbed

‘delegative democracy’ (O’Donnell, 1994 and 1998): unconsolidated democracies in which the

mechanisms of horizontal accountability are easily overridden through an informal

understanding of power in which ‘whoever wins the presidency’ claims entitlement ‘to govern as

he or she sees fit’ (ibid., 1994, p. 59). There is an implicit spectrum of behavioral choices within

this concept as not all presidents will use weakened checks and balances to try to monopolize

power. But there are likely to be ‘transgressive’ presidents who seize the opportunity to make

full use of their informal authority in an attempt to override even the weak checks remaining on

their power. But presidents who do go beyond the wide bounds of delegative democracy often

face a showdown with the legislature and the courts. The result is political instability and often a

major constitutional crisis (Shugart and Carey, 1992 and Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997).

Electoral democracy is likely to be threatened either of a ‘defensive’ coup of the president’s

enemies or by an autogolpe by the president himself.

Yet when compared across Southeast Asian, these twin perils that have beset the

Philippines of imperious political leaders threatening to overturn electoral democracy or those

leaders imperiled by mass protests led by opponents accusing them of power abuse find striking

parallels in parliamentary Thailand. In that mainland Southeast Asia nation Thaksin Shinawatra

and his surrogates, who often acted against liberal principles in a transgressive fashion, were

toppled by powerful elite groups in a manner similar to Estrada’s downfall. The Indonesian case,

by contrast, shows a relatively stable presidential system that has neither suffered neither from

elite-led coups nor overweening chief executives who undermined horizontal accountability.

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The initial section of this paper considers how ‘first wave’ presidentialism theory of Linz

and his collaborators appears to explain the way competing legitimacy claims contributed to the

overthrow of Estrada as a key example of an imperiled president in the Philippines. Upon closer

examination, however, it is evident elite societal actors were crucial in the actual toppling of

Estrada and that gridlock between the chief executive and the legislature is exceptional in the

patronage-drive Philippine political system. The second section examines how the concept of

‘delegative democracy’, which can be seen as a sub-set of the anti-presidentialism argument,

helps elucidate the imperious nature of the Marcos and Duterte presidencies as well as the

overweening powers of Philippine presidents generally. The third section, however, suggests

when looking at other Southeast Asian cases, the institutional explanation of presidentialist

instability in the Philippines proves inutile. Under similar political circumstances, Thaksin and

his surrogates were removed from office by powerful elite ‘strategic groups’. Before Thaksin lost

power as prime minister, he had erected a transgressive form of ‘delegative democracy’. In

Indonesia, by contrast, the presidential system has been relatively stable. One president was

removed from office, but according to constitutional guidelines and without causing major

political unrest, while none of the other post-Suharto presidents have been clearly transgressive

in their exercise of executive power.

Perilous Philippine presidentialism I: gridlock

The ‘first wave’ of the presidentialism literature has the advantage of making clear claims about

the differential impact of presidential or parliamentary systems on the degree of democratic

stability (Elgie, 2005). Juan J. Linz, who revived the ‘perilous presidentialism’ thesis, argued that

despite there being varieties of presidential and parliamentary systems, there are ‘fundamental

differences’ between them, with democratic presidential systems more likely to break down than

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parliamentary ones. Linz argued that separate elections as well as the rigidity created by the fixed

terms of the president and members of congress are the two key aspects of presidentialism, with

other ‘characteristics and problems’ of presidentialism deriving from these ‘essential features’

(Linz, 1994, 4-6). Seconding this argument, Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach (1993, 17-18) argue

that the ‘essence of pure presidentialism is mutual independence’ of the chief executive and

legislature, with gridlock between the two branches of government more likely to cause

instability than in a unitary parliamentary system where no such potential conflict exists.

At this point it becomes apparent that applying the perilous presidentialism argument to

the Philippine case is difficult. Despite two important institutional idiosyncrasies (a separately

elected vice president and a nationally elected senate), the Philippines is a relatively straight

forward example of presidentialism with a strict separation between the chief executive and the

legislature. These two peculiarities of the Philippine political system do not affect the strict

institutional separation of the executive and legislature. But the nationally elected senate (with

senators serving six year terms, the same as the president) has proved somewhat less vulnerable

to presidential pressure (primarily through patronage) than members of the lower house elected

in local districts for two years. A separately elected vice president may also prove a hindrance

(albeit a minor one given the limited powers of the vice presidency) to a ‘transgressive’ president

trying to undermine even the weak checks of ‘delegative democracy’.

Yet important informal elements of Philippine politics make gridlock between the chief

executive and legislative branch relatively rare. Crucially in this respect, Philippine parties are

quite ‘weak’ in that they are ‘under-instititutionalized’ along both external/systemic and

internal/organizational dimensions (Hicken, in press; Manasca and Tan, 2005). Externally,

interparty competition is fluid and parties are not accepted by voters/significant social groups as

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either legitimate in or necessary for the functioning of the political system (ibid.). Internally, it is

clear that parties lack strong societal roots and do not have or uphold clear and distinctive party

platforms. Instead, platforms are more like ‘motherhood statements passed off as political

programmes’ (Quimpo, 2007, 277). Allen Hicken (in press) argues that in the Philippines

‘organizationally parties tend to be feeble, factionalized, and fleeting’. Parties are controlled by

country's oligarchic elite and ‘are built around personalities, rather than around political

programmes or platforms’ with ideologies and platforms…just adornments for them’ (Quimpo,

2007, 277). There is little internal discipline as parties are merely electoral vehicles for

candidates who use clientelistic networks, not programmatic appeals to win votes. Thus there is

no incentive to invest in upgrading party organization or elaborating party programmes. Given

weak loyalty of both party members and candidates to ‘their parties’, party switching is common

with multiple memberships common (Ufen 2012, 455-56). Summing up parties’ weakness in the

Philippines with rhetorical flourish, Nathan Quimpo (2007) suggests: ‘Far from being stable

organizations [Philippine parties] have proven to be nebulous entities that can be set up, merged

with others, split, resurrected, regurgitated, reconstituted, renamed, repackaged, recycled, or

flushed down the toilet any time.’

Although generally seen as harmful to the quality of Philippine democracy due to the lack

of accountability to the electorate strong parties help provide, there is a ‘positive’ aspect of the

Philippines’ weak party system when viewed from the vantage point of the potential perils of

presidentialism. Because parties are weak, the gridlock seen as characteristic of many

presidential systems seldom occurs in the Philippines. Instead, Philippine observers speak of the

balimbing (the many side fruit) effect or ‘political butterfly’ phenomenon, meaning that would-

be turncoat politicians can easily change sides/’fly’ from one party to another (De Guzman,

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2012, Fernandez, 2016)). This explains why in every post-Marcos presidential election, the

winning presidential candidate has easily assembled a large legislative majority, even if the new

chief executive belonged to a small political party.

Party-switching was particularly obvious after the election of Rodrigo R. Duterte as

president in May 2016. Although Duterte came to power with what can fairly be termed a

‘micro-party’ (Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan, Philippine Democratic Party-

Power of the People) with only one senator and three seats in the House of Representatives, it

soon become the ruling coalition through a familiar process of defections to the winning

president’s side. As a result of post-election party-switching, however, he was able to assemble a

200-plus supermajority to back his ally Pantaleon ‘Bebot’ Alvarez’s bid for House speaker

Similarly, Aquilino ‘Koko’ Pimentel, Jr., the lone PDP-Laban senator, was elected president of

the Senate (Romero, 2016). This mass turncoatism occurred despite warnings by the once

dominant Liberal Party during the campaign that Duterte planned to erect a dictatorship, showing

how even parties claiming to be ‘programmatic’ yield to their members’ demands to be included

in presidential patronage distribution to Congress (Cupin, 2017).

The incumbent president is able to cultivate a loose coalition of individual legislators and

particularistic blocs on guarantees of easier and bigger access to choice ‘pork barrel funds’ and

special budgetary appropriations. Rivera (1998, 255–56) notes, ‘the presidency’s clout in this

process derives from its control over the releases of crucial budgetary appropriations including

the ‘pork barrel’ funds of individual legislators in both Houses of Congress, and it is this singular

power of the presidency over the disbursement of funds that makes both Houses vulnerable to

presidential initiatives and agenda setting in law making.’

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As distasteful as ‘pork barreling’ may appear (Holmes, in press), it does not explain why

presidentialism has been perilous in the Philippines. There is no gridlock resulting in a zero sum

conflict between two elected branches of government each claiming their own, distinct electoral

legitimacy. Rather, critics often see the Philippine legislature and Congress working too closely

together, with Congress not providing an adequate check on executive authority and the

president engaging in legalized bribery through the allocation of pork barrel to legislators

(Mendoza, 2010; Holmes, in press), again underlining the ‘delegative’ character of Philippine

democracy.

So why did president Joseph Estrada become an imperiled president who was forced out

of office extra-constitutionally in 2001? Estrada, a movie star turned pro-poor populist politician

easily won the 1998 presidential elections and soon won over a comfortable majority in both the

house and senate after taking office. However, less than three years after taking office Estrada

was impeached by the lower house, unprecedented in the history of the Philippine presidency.

Yuko Kasuya (2005) has offered an ingenious explanation of Estrada’s impeachment in

November 2000 with a significant number of the house members voting for the resolution

coming from his own party, the Lapiang ng Masang Pilipino (Party of the Filipino Masses, or

LAMP). Through regression analysis, she found that the decision by LAMP legislators to vote

for impeachment was primarily influenced by how much patronage they had received from

Estrada in the past or their expectation of how much they would receive in the future. More

specifically, she found that the party switchers, i.e. those who had joined Estrada’s LAMP after

his victory in the 1998 presidential election victory, were more likely to endorse impeachment

bill than those already in the party before then. She claims the latecomers had received less

patronage from Estrada and thus felt less loyal. A second factor Kasuya points to is that those

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LAMP members who faced a looming term limit (legislators are limited to three consecutive

three year terms) were also more likely to vote against Estrada because they placed less value on

future patronage than those members able to run for an additional term did (ibid., p. 521).

As plausible as these explanations appear, they run into difficulty upon closer

examination. Kasuya assumes that the degree of some legislators’ loyalty to Estrada was based

on past patronage while that of others was determined by future events (whether facing a term

limit or not). But these explanations appear mutually exclusive. If one feels loyal to the president

due to past patronage, one would expect that loyalty to continue regardless of term limits in the

future. A second point related to the issue of term limits is that although they were designed to

limit the power of political families in the Philippines by forcing them to leave office after a set

number of terms, it has been shown many members of the lower house are replaced in power

(standing and usually winning in the next election) by a close family member (Querubin 2011).

Pablo Querubin (2011, 3-4) has argued that in fact ‘term limits may have the perverse effect of

strengthening political dynasties’ which led term-limited incumbents to bring ‘additional family

members into politics’ making ‘dynasties more powerful as a family then controls multiple

offices simultaneously’. Given the importance of political dynasties in the Philippines (McCoy

1994), it can be expected that family members pass on loyalty in regard to patronage relations

even as they switch places in the legislature. Thus expectations of future patronage may well

extend beyond a term limit to the next member of the family designated to replace the departing

legislator.

A third factor is Estrada’s view of the situation himself. In an interview with this author,

Estrada claimed he did not request loyalty from lower house members during the impeachment

process, allowing them to take an open vote (Estrada 2015). Instead he only demanded loyalty of

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senators to stay in office. That the senate did in fact stay loyal to Estrada appears to confirm his

claim. The impeachment charge was never actually put to a vote about whether to convict

Estrada and remove him from office. Estrada’s supporters were able to suppress what was

considered by advocates of impeachment to be a crucial piece of evidence, leading the latter

group to abandon the process altogether.

But while Kusaya’s patronage-based explanation runs into difficulties, it does contribute

to the overall argument that a conflict between a president and a legislature in a presidential

system can be politically destabilizing because both can plausibly claim to represent the people

through their direct election to office. This problem of competing legitimacies is worsened in the

Philippine case because, like the president, senators are also elected nationally. This brings us

back to arguably Linz’s most persuasive indictment against presidentialism: that there is no way

to determine whether the legislature or the chief executive are the ‘true’ representatives of the

people and thus there is not democratically legitimate way to resolve conflicts between the two

branches of government.

As mentioned above, after his impeachment in the lower house in November 2000,

Estrada was not convicted by the senate. But Estrada’s impeachment and failed conviction

clearly did trigger the elite-led protests that ultimately led to Estrada’s downfall. Initially it was

the Catholic Church hierarchy that had campaigned hardest against Estrada. They were soon

joined by major business leaders, many of whom had close ties to the Catholic Bishops. Later

civil society activists, particularly students, played a key part in organizing protests and bringing

out large crowds. But Estrada was only doomed when top generals also withdrew their support

(Landé 2001; Abinales and Amoroso 2005, 275–77; Thompson 2014).

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Estrada’s successor to the presidency, vice-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was a

master of patronage politics. But even she was not able to stop the populist juggernaut of

Fernando Poe Jr. - Estrada’s friend and even more popular movie star politician in 2004.

Enjoying the strong backing of elite groups who feared Poe, Arroyo turned to electoral

manipulation to ensure her victory in that election (Raquiza 2005). Arroyo paid for her electoral

wrongdoings, however, when she was later caught on tape apparently discussing voter

manipulation in the 2004 national election with then election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano.

This so-called Hello Garci scandal of mid 2005 revealed the extent of the cheating involved and

resulted in a further loss in her popular support. This led to a major legitimacy crisis resulting in

repeated military coup attempts with civilian backing (Teehankee 2016a). But besides her ability

to consolidate control over the legislature through the familiar instruments of patronage

distribution discussed above, Arroyo was also able to cling to power because three of the

country’s chief extra-electoral strategic groups1—big business, the Catholic Church hierarchy,

and the military brass – continued to support her despite vehement opposition to her presidency

by the fourth group, civil society activists, ranging from liberals, to social democrats, to the

above-ground organizations of the communist left (Abinales 2006). She was also able to fend off

repeated impeachment attempts through her control of the lower house. Political instability

during the Arroyo administration thus had nothing to do with gridlock and everything to do with

1 Strategic groups are not reducible to a social class (e.g., the bourgeoisie) that form a homogenous ruling elite

(Evers 1973). As group consciousness emerges in a society, heterogeneous elite groups begin to act strategically to

accumulate power resources and attempt to influence state policy. Strategic groups have elitist leaderships

(sometimes hierarchical, in other cases decentralized) with a lower-level membership, clientele, or mass base. These

groups are distinguished by their different power resources: in the case of the military force/coercion, for big

business capital/property, and for religious leaders a widespread belief system. These groups may unite around a

program of political action based on common interests and ideological commitments (Berner 1995). As extra-

electoral power brokers, strategic groups can buttress or challenge the power of elected politicians, the president in

particular. On the role of business as a strategic group see Fukuoka (2015) and Hedman (2006). Hedman also

discusses the role of the Catholic church (in addition see Barry 2006) and the military (also see Hall 2004) as well as

stressing the role of the U.S. in intra-elite conflict.

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the legitimacy crisis she faced after being seen to usurp the presidency from Estrada (who though

hated by the elite was still loved by the masa, poor voters, as polls showed) which worsened with

revelations she had manipulated of the 2004 presidential polls.

Like Arroyo, the first post-Marcos president, Cory Aquino had also faced repeated

military coups but this also does not fit into the ‘gridlock’ explanation, with her difficulties being

due to the transitional situation in which pro-Marcos elements and military rebels tried to

overthrow her in a series of coups. In fact, although coup threats continued Aquino was able to

peel away layers of opposition by holding elections, with key personalities choosing electoralism

over insurrectionism (Thompson 1995, ch 9). Once electoral democracy was fully restored at all

levels via a plebiscite for a new constitution (1987), legislative and local elections (1988) and

village (barangay) elections (1989), the system began to stabilize. In another words, it was a

fully functional presidential system that stabilized democracy. The system stabilized further with

the election of Fidel Ramos in the 1992 elections, despite Ramos winning fewer than a fourth of

the votes in a one round, multi-party electoral system (Teehankee 2016a). The narrow margin of

victory was not as significant as the fact that now all offices in the system had been elected

relatively freely and fairly. Ramos also enjoyed strong elite support, which helps explain why his

presidency was stable, unlike his successor Estrada who would be overthrown in an uprisings led

not just by opposition politicians but also by key extra-electoral elite strategic groups,

particularly the Catholic church, big business, civil society activists, and, ultimately, the military

(Thompson 2008). What has destabilized the Philippine presidency is not gridlock with the

legislature but opposition by powerful societal elite groups.

Perilous presidentialism II: Delegative democracy

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Given the problematic character of the ‘gridlock’ argument for explaining how presidentialism

has contributed to political instability in the Philippines, some analysts of the Philippine

presidentialism have turned to what is in a sense the opposite argument - a ‘delegative’

presidency (Ronas 2016). As discussed above, for O’Donnell democracies which are ‘delegative’

are unconsolidated political systems because the mechanics of horizontal accountability are

subverted by the informal powers of the executive. While O’Donnell (1996 and 1998) does not

specify presidentialism as a necessary characteristic of ‘delegative democracy’, his chief

examples of this phenomenon are drawn from presidential regimes in Latin America and he

argues that winning ‘presidential candidates in DDs [delegative democracies] present themselves

as above both political parties and organized interests’ (O’Donnell 1994, 60) meaning that

‘whoever wins the presidency’ claims entitlement ‘to govern as he or she sees fit’ (ibid., p. 59).

Thus, ‘[c]learly, presidentialism has more affinity with DD than parliamentarianism’ (O’Donnell

1994, 67, n. 11). O’Donnell seems to be implying here that delegative democracy is a sub-set of

presidentialism. He makes a point though of adding (1994, 16, n. 11) that the workings of

parliamentary systems can also be subverted if ‘delegative propensities are strong’, a point

discussed below in the case of Thailand.

While influenced by the U.S. model, the Philippines has more closely followed the Latin

American example of ‘strong presidents’ given the strong fiscal prerogatives and coercive

powers of the chief executives of this Southeast Asian nation (Teehankee 2016a, 294). Philippine

presidents have much more formal power than their U.S. counterparts given their wide discretion

over budgetary matters, right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (and even in the post-Marcos

constitution to declare martial law unilaterally, although subject to scrutiny from the supreme

court and congress), ability to circumvent legislative and judicial constraints, and their

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domination of the theoretically independent regulatory and oversight agencies mentioned above.

Susan Rose-Ackerman and Diane Desierto (2011) see the Philippines as a case of ‘hyper-

presidentialism’, with Emil Bolongaita Jr (1995, 110) even arguing that ‘among presidential

democracies, the Philippine president virtually has no equal in terms of aggregate executive

power.’ In Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart’s terms (1997, 449) the Philippines is an

example of the least functional form of presidentialism given the strength of presidential

legislative powers and the lack of disciplined parties.

Instead of suggesting the system is destabilized by a fight for dominance of the political

system based on competing claims of electoral legitimation between the president and the

legislature, the claim of the ‘delegative presidentialism’ critique is that because Philippine

presidents are so hegemonic they can relegate the legislature, the courts, and independent bodies

to subordinate status despite their theoretically being co-equal branches of government or

constitutionally mandated agencies. Because the president can encroach on the authority of other

government bodies, horizontal accountability is undermined in delegative democracy

(O’Donnell, 1998, 117).

The reason presidential power can be so easily abused goes back to an argument made

above in regard to the rareness of gridlock between the chief executive and the legislature. With

patronage resources concentrated in the presidency, the president becomes ‘patron-in-chief’

(Thompson, 2014, 235). Given the extraordinary powers the Philippine president possesses over

the budget and the extensive clientelist ties evident in Philippine politics, the president is the

effective dispenser of patronage which is crucial for influencing legislative decision-making.

This power of the patronage purse tends to undermine trust in government as public good is

subordinated to private gain (Ronas 2016, 82). A number of key scandals among post-Marcos

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presidents can be attributed to the weak horizontal accountability of Philippine President (Ronas

2016, 82). Presidents appear to be above the law due to their immunity from suits, the limited

ability of the judiciary to check them,2 and because it is so difficult to remove the chief executive

from office through impeachment/conviction (as we saw above, despite ferocious opposition,

even Estrada could not constitutionally be removed from power because of the unwillingness of

the senate to convict him). Presidents’ influence over state institutions extends to the military

which they can use to declare emergency rule or even martial law. Malaya C. Ronas (2016, 81)

sums up this indictment of Philippine presidentialism this way: ‘…the President’s authority [is]

nearly ubiquitous in the entire state apparatus’.

It has been argued that one factor for the ‘extraordinary power’ of Philippine presidents

rests on the need of politician oligarchs who have supported a presidential campaign to be repaid

in kind through patronage distribution (Van de Loo, 2004). Yet it can also be argued that a strong

presidency finds justification in a system divided along particularistic lines by local elites. In the

complex political network in which the president plays the role of ‘patron-in-chief’ both appear

to be true – the president-as-debt payer and the president-as-uniter. Newly elected presidents are

concerned to repay their chief supporters as well as use patronage to attract new allies.

Yet this is not to claim that presidents-as-kingpins’ necessarily become dictators. While

O’Donnell (1994, p. 56) argues ‘delegative democracies’ are unlikely to be on a path to full

representative democracy, he also insists that they are also not necessarily threatened by

2 An important exception is the 2013 Supreme Court decision that the Priority Development and Assistance Fund

(PDAF), the chief vehicle or presidential patronage to the legislature was unconstitutional. But then president

Benigno S. ‘Noynoy’ Aquino, III managed to partially circumvent this decision by distributing funds directly to

congressional districts. Earlier court rulings (as well as public protests and press campaigns) against presidential-

legislative pork barrel also did not led to the abolition of the practice. Not surprisingly, since then pork barrel has not

only returned under the current Duterte administration but has been substantially increased (Porcalla 2016).This has

led Ronald Holmes (in press) to argue the pork barrel in the Philippines is continuously “transmogrified”, defying

efforts to abolish it.

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authoritarian regression. This means that separate consideration must be given to presidents in a

delegative democracy who do become obviously illiberal. In the Philippines, not all presidents

have taken full advantage of the opportunity offered by ‘delegative democracy’ to use the

weakness of checks and balances to consolidate their power beyond democratic bounds. In this

sense they are ‘non-transgressive’ toward electoral democracy. One clear example was Cory

Aquino who, despite her extraordinary powers at the beginning of the presidency when she

abolished the Marcos constitution and replaced local officials loyal to the fallen dictator, she did

not herself establish a dictatorship. Nor did she use her control of Congress (once elections were

held in 1987) through patronage to attempt to stay in power beyond the end of her term in 1992

despite ambiguity about whether the one term limit set by the new constitution applied to her

given the extra-constitutional circumstances of her rise to power (Thompson 1995, ch 9).

But there have been Philippine presidents who have attempted to make full use of their

informal authority, threatening to overturn liberal democracy and forcing a showdown with those

opposed to their ambitions. Thus although the powers of all Philippines presidents – formal and

informal – are substantial, two chief executives stand out as exercising this authority over other

governmental actors in an outright authoritarian or at least in an increasingly illiberal manner.

The first is of course Ferdinand Marcos, a legally elected president (in 1965, re-elected in 1969)

who declared martial law in 1972 and who remained the unchallenged authoritarian leader of the

country until he was overthrown in 1986. The second is the current president of the Philippines

as of this writing, Rodrigo Duterte, who although not yet an outright dictator, is a strongman

ruler who has already violated the rule of law in number of ways as well as declaring martial law

at a regional level while threatening to do so nationally (Holmes and Thompson 2017;

Teehankee and Thompson 2016). Marcos’ martial rule led to a breakdown of Philippine

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democracy; Duterte represents the most serious threat since the redemocratization of the country

three decades ago. These two presidencies took the Philippines’ ‘delegative presidency’ to its

extreme conclusion: dictatorship, or at least a credible threat thereof. While ‘delegative’ in terms

of hegemony over the legislature through patronage and generally able to override possible

checks by the courts and independent agencies, the post-Marcos Philippine presidential system

remained ‘liberal reformist’ until the rise of Duterte due to regular competitive elections (vertical

accountability), the need to channel presidential patronage through the legislature, the relative

independence of the military from presidential authority, and a general respect for the rule of law

(at least at the national level). In order to understand the nature of this argument completely, how

both of these presidencies overcame these constraints as well need to be briefly examined.

Marcos was the Filipino Caesar. Even before he declared martial law in 1972 –

establishing an authoritarian regime that survived until 1986 – he had become the most powerful

president since independence in 1946.3 He took the powers available to a Philippine president

and used them to their maximum extent, expanding them continuously during his legal term in

office (1966-1972). Although costs of campaigns did increase significantly before Marcos, with

government spending in the red during campaign years, Marcos ran deficits even in non-election

years to fund a huge infrastructure projects that were distributed to achieve maximum political

advantage (Doronila 1985). But Marcos was not just content to buy off politicians and voters, he

also made sure he had the armed forces tightly under his personal control, undertaking the largest

reorganization of the military the country had ever experienced, promoting his loyalists and

3 Marcos’ presidency did, however, resemble Manuel Quezon’s Commonwealth administration. Quezon used the

powers of patronage during the late colonial era in which domestic power had been returned to Filipinos to control

the legislature and politicians generally while holding the judiciary and military under his sway to such an extent

that his became a quasi-authoritarian regime, providing a precedent for Marcos’s establishment of a full-fledged

dictatorship (McCoy 1988).

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relatives to the highest levels (Berlin 1982). Marcos further reshuffled top military commanders

shortly before declaring martial law to insure their absolute loyalty. The so called ‘Rolex

Twelve’ (each given that Swiss watch by Marcos) helped plan martial law months in advance.

Marcos also increased the size of the armed forces considerably and doubled its budget

(Brillantes 1987, 37-47). He also won the ‘hearts and minds’ of military officers with a survey

showing most favored emergency rule before Marcos actually declared martial law (Canoy 1984,

23). Yet opposition remained, in the ‘parliament of the streets’ (major leftwing student protests)

and in congress, particularly the senate where opposition senators spoke out strongly against the

regime until martial law (Thompson 1995, ch 2).

Under martial rule, elections were cancelled, congress abolished, the supreme court

intimidated and a new constitution put in place (in a pseudo referendum conducted by a show of

hands in local barangays). Although Marcos revived elections in 1978, he had by then

established a dominant ruling party with the opposition cheated in the legislative polls, leading

most of them to boycott the 1981 presidential elections. Only after the assassination of

opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. in August 1983, did widespread protest and foreign

pressure (particularly from the U.S.) force Marcos to alklow elections to be more competitive,

enabling those oppositionists who participated in the 1984 legislative polls to perform better than

expected (although the KBL still won a commanding majority). Marcos then called early, ‘snap’

presidential election in 1986 which he officially won but which was widely seen to have been a

‘stolen’ election triggering the ‘people power’ uprising that led to Marcos’ downfall (Kuntz and

Thompson 2009). By abolishing and then undercutting elections, Marcos had destroyed ‘vertical’

accountability to the electorate, going far beyond the delegative presidency model with

weakened ‘horizontal’ accountability.

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Marcos may have destroyed Philippine democracy in 1972, but already during the early

months of his administration Duterte had gone far in undermining it (Thompson 2016a). He won

majority support in both houses of congress through the patronage powers of the president

(discussed above), although his control of the lower house is stronger than his control of the

senate - some of Duterte’s fiercest opponents are in the senate, using congressional hearings

about the drug war and smuggling charges linked to the president’s family in an attempt to

embarrass and weaken the president. Duterte did however have chief opponent in the senate,

Leila de Lima, jailed on dubious drug charges. But he still faces push back from the vice

president Maria Leonor ‘Leni’ Robredo, due to another idiosyncrasy of the country’s political

system, a separately elected vice president. While she has taken some high profile stances against

the president on the bloody drug war and the heroes’ burial he granted Marcos (Robredo, like

most post-Marcos vice presidents, was elected from an opposition party), her efforts have fallen

short of ‘full-on opposition’ (Pasion 2017). Yet she was still punished for her dissent by being

removed from a cabinet position she held at Duterte’s discretion and, with the very limited

powers of her office, has been able to do little to slow the country’s illiberal turn, with the

president’s supporters (‘Dutertards’) demanding her removal in mass demonstrations and

members of the president’s majority in the lower house considering filing impeachment charges

against her.

Duterte has also cowed the courts, starting with the supreme court, which quickly backed

down after a confrontation over a list of suspected drug-taking judges despite it proving to be

obviously erroneous with Duterte threatening to declare martial law if the court tried to stand in

the way of his drug war (Jerusalem and Ramos, 2016). Although Duterte was elected in free and

fair polls in May 2016 and has formally upheld most political liberties (the press is not censored

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and congress and the courts have not been subject to restrictions), the substance of his rule - in

particular orchestrating and encouraging the extra-judicial killing of thousands of supposed drug

dealers and addicts – has been openly illiberal. Thus while Duterte acts illiberally, he is

legitimated democratically and rules to large extent constitutionally (Thompson 2017).

Duterte was able to take advantage of the systemic crisis of this once dominant liberal

reformist political order despite the personal popularity of his predecessor Noynoy Aquino due

to the undermining of the good governance narrative, the discrediting of key extra-electoral elite

strategic groups backing it (particularly the Church and social democrat activists) and the

weakening of liberal institutions (Thompson 2016b). Deploying an illiberal populist ‘order over

law’ (Pepinsky 2017) narrative during his presidential campaign which has become the

governing script of his early presidency, any remaining institutional barriers to this illiberalism

were quickly sidelined with mass defections to his once tiny political party and the timidity of

the Supreme Court. Given Dutere’s open contempt for human rights and his violent ‘war on

drugs’, although his promised constitutional overhaul is meant to focus installing federalist it

‘can easily stoke the fear that it is an attempt to reinstate authoritarianism and curtail civil rights

and political freedoms’ (Agugay 2016). There is also speculation that the constitutional

commission – the exact structure of which and membership of have not been announced as of

this writing – will change the Philippines (back) into a French-style semi-presidential system

which was used during the Marcos dictatorship (Cayabyab 2016).Walden Bello (2016) points out

that Duterte has also achieved widespread public support for his strongman rule. Duterte has not

‘feared to transgress liberal discourse [which] not only does…not trouble a significant part of the

population, they’ve even clapped for it!’ Criticized by the Obama administration for massive

human rights violations during the drug war which led Duterte to threaten ‘separation’ from the

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U.S. and warm toward the Chinese, Duterte seems to have found a new political friend in the

new U.S. president Donald Trump who has praised the crackdown. Still popular at home and

finding new allies abroad, Duterte uses a strongly nationalist narrative (Teehankee 2016b) and

claims that only violent strongman rule can bring political order to the country (Holmes and

Thompson 2017).

In the Philippines, Marcos and Duterte can be viewed as authoritarian ‘breakthroughs’ in

a ‘delegative’ democratic system with weak checks and balances. The example of the Philippines

appears to show that the delegative democracy characteristic of presidentialism is another aspect

of the potential perilousness of this form of democratic government. In the Philippines, the

presidency has been ‘an institution of uncontested authority, spreading both patronage and

autocratic abuse’ (Dressel 2011, 530-31). In two different historical periods – the early 1970s

and the 2010s – determined presidents quickly turned a delegative democracy into an

increasingly illiberal one or even a fully authoritarian system.

Unstable parliamentarianism in Thailand, stable presidentialism in Indonesia

The claim that presidentialism is the differentia specifica explaining the twin perils facing

national leaders imperiled by extra-electoral elite strategic groups and prone to imperious

‘delegative’ rule which can lead to illiberalism or even dictatorship is challenged by data from

other Southeast Asian cases. In Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a ‘people

power putsch’ similar to the toppling of Estrada in the Philippines with Thaksin’s abuse of power

helping generate opposition mobilization which in turn gave the military a pretext for a coup

(Thompson 2008). Indonesia’s democracy, whatever its quality, has persisted despite its

presidential system.

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In Thailand, Thaksin’s party easily won the 2001 parliamentary elections. Despite

enjoying a strong majority in parliament without rigid terms of office and winning repeatedly in

a unified electoral system, key societal elites challenged his legitimacy, leading to a civilian

protests and then a militarily enforced ‘people power coup’ in 2006 quite similar in its political

structure to what had happened in the Philippines with the overthrow of Estrada several years

earlier (Thompson 2008). Furthermore, Thaksin’s opponents accused him of taking an imperious

attitude toward his opponents and undermining horizontal checks and balances.

Yet Thaksin’s rise as a populist appeared to be very different from that of Estrada, a

movie star politician who had seamlessly transferred his celluloid image of a tough guy

defending the little guys to a politician promising to help the poor (Hedman 2001). A successful

businessman from a northern provincial Thai family, Thaksin founded the Thai Rak Thai (TRT

or ‘Thais love Thais’) party in 1998 with little foreshadowing of his later populist turn. While

Estrada was a ‘natural’ populist, a role he had already played in his movies, Thaksin constructed

his image as a fighter for the poor as elite attacks against him mounted (Pasuk and Baker 2008;

Hewison 2017). Thaksin promised, and delivered, on specific policy commitments to the

underprivileged: agrarian debt relief, low cost universal health care and funds for poor villages.

Once in office, Thaksin outdid any previous prime minister using state-owned media under his

control to launch a weekly radio program to play up his pro-poor activities (Pasuk and Baker,

2008, p. 65). Whether a movie star populist like Estrada or an accidental champion of the

downtrodden like Thaksin, both politicians were able to make effective appeals to poor voters.

Thaksin and Estrada’s pro-poor populism made them targets of heated attacks from elite

strategic groups. In Thailand, ‘yellow shirt’ protestors took to the streets shortly after the pro-

Thaksin party’s overwhelming victory in the 2005 elections, accusing the re-elected prime

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minister of massive corruption. Such charges are not new in Thai politics and are often well-

founded (as few seem to doubt they are regarding Thaksin). But it seems unlikely they were the

main reason for the intensity of the largely urban based upper and middle-class based hostility to

Thaksin. Rather, angered by Thaksin’s growing power and his appeals to the poor, an informal

network of the military, bureaucracy, business community, and in elitist ‘civil society’, which

Duncan McCargo terms the ‘network monarchy’ in Thailand (McCargo, 2005), took the

offensive against Thaksin. This alliance elites developed an ‘anti-democratic discourse that

devalued votes and voters that had gained political ascendency’ (Hewison, 2015, 60; also see

Ferrara 2015).

The return of ‘people power’ to the Philippines (with Estrada’s overthrow in 2001) and to

Thailand (the toppling of Thaksin in 2006 occurred after mass protests similar to those which

occurred in 1992 thnmat led to the collapse of military rule then) was elite-driven. Like in the

Philippines, elite ‘strategic groups’ in Thailand orchestrated civilian protests which paved the

way for the Thai prime minister’s overthrow by the military (the military had also played a role

in Estrada’s downfall as discussed above) (Thompson 2008). Unlike in the Philippines before

Estrada’ downfall, however, the military coup in Thailand was not preceded by gridlock in the

legislature as Thaksin had overwhelming control of parliament. Yet the political pattern of elite-

led civilian protest leading to military intervention was similar. It might be objected that the role

played by the military in Thailand is much more important than in the Philippines. Although the

Philippine military is certainly less politicized than in Thailand and has never succeeded in

launching a full-fledged military coup, there have been numerous coup attempts from various

factions in the military and the military hierarchy was crucial to the 2001 overthrow of Estrada.

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Critics of Thaksin claimed that he had abused the powers of his office. Throughout his

time in office, Thakin was accused of intimidating critics and undermining independent

institutions. For example, he interfered with military promotions, often putting his own relatives

in top positions (Pavin 2011). Thaksin also took on the bureaucracy, challenging the prerogatives

of a number of key ministries and replacing traditional patronage networks with his own political

alliances. In terms of his business dealings, he upset rival tycoons by monopolizing property

deals and government contracts. Thaksin also harassed critical journalists. But one has to be

cautious about taking this elite claim that the overthrow of Thaksin was meant to restore

horizontal accountability too seriously (Slater 2013). Despite their self-proclaimed democratic

motives, Thaksin’s elite critics did not shy from openly supporting military rulers in 2006-07 or

after the 2014 coup.

The trigger for civilian protests was the tax-free sale of Thaksin’s Shin Corp to Temasek,

the Singapore government’s sovereign wealth fund, in 2006 which enabled the so called

‘People’s Alliance for Democracy’ (PAD) to win support from the Bangkok middle class. But

more symbolically, the ‘network monarchy’ began to fear that his pro-poor programs were

overshadowing the monarchy’s royal projects to help the poor.

Like the overthrow of Estrada in the Philippines, Thaksin’s fall can be understood in

Gramscian terms in which traditional elites tried to restore their lost hegemony (Hedman 2001).

The network monarchy felt gravely threatened by Thaksin, a populist politician which such

strong ties to poor voters that he easily won elections (with his renamed party even winning the

first post-coup election in late 2007 and again winning the 2011 polls, with his sister governing

as prime minister until her government was overthrown by a further coup in 2014). In Thailand,

like in the Philippines, communalist elites (with royalists claiming similar moral standing

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structurally similar to the Catholic Church in the Philippines), business leaders, middle class

activists and the military joined to unseat a leader popular among the poor but hated by these

strategic groups.4

Through what was essentially a people power putsch they removed their rival and

restored their authority through military fiat. Because Thaksin managed to institutionalize his

challenge through his political party (renamed and reorganized each time it was banned) and a

flanking red shirt movement, Thai elites ultimately had to resort to full blown and long term

military rule to suppress the challenge (Pavin 2014). But this had nothing to do with Thailand’s

parliamentary system just as Estrada’s downfall was not the result of presidentialism. It was the

outcome of extreme political polarization between pro-poor populist politicians and their elite

enemies (Thompson 2008, Hewison 2015).

In presidentialist Indonesia, on the other hand, when a major conflict occurred between a

president and the legislature, the chief executive was removed constitutionally (Wahid

Abdurrahman in 2001) without this substantially threatening the stability of the political system.

Furthermore, none of the five post-Suharto Indonesian presidents have proved transgressive

towards liberal democracy despite opting for broad coalitions with limited opposition to win the

cooperation of the legislature which can be seen as the Indonesian version of ‘delegative

democracy’. Critics se it as an inbred system based on an informal cartel of key political parties

which undermines electoral accountability because of voters’ inability to distinguish between

parties colluding together (Mietzner and Aspinall 2010, Sherlock 2010, Slater 2004). Yet similar

4 A group not discussed in detail here – the above ground communist left which is subsumed under the category of

‘civil society activists’ in this paper – is missing in the Thai case given its defeat by the Thai government in the late

1970s. Although the Philippine left has weakened significantly since 1986 (Abinales 1996), its above ground activist

groups have remained important in civil society protests even as its armed insurgency has ebbed. Yet a stronger far

left in the Philippines had little impact on the dynamics between traditional elites and pro-poor populists in the

Philippines which it is suggested were quite similar to the situation in Thailand.

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to the Philippines, executive distribution of patronage to the legislature has served to stabilize the

political system by avoiding the ‘zero sum character’ of presidentialism which Linz warned

about because even the losers in the presidential elections receive a share of power and patronage

after the polls (Ziegenhain 2015, p. 236).

It is revealing that the removal of Wahid in 2001 occurred through institutional channels

and not as the result of major ‘civil society’ protests. Crucially, there was no major pro-poor

populist challenge to strategic groups in Indonesia nor any major counter-mobilization of middle

class activists instigated by establishment elites as occurred in the Philippines and Thailand.

Cross-cutting traditional cultural-religious cleavages in Indonesia (known as aliran) limit the

potential of populist class-based appeals to poor voters. Indonesian parties are still to some

extent embedded in particular milieus where differences between nominal, secular nationalist,

and religious Muslims (and among the last group between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’

Muslim identities) are crucial. While dealiranisasi (the dealignment of these traditional ethno-

religious cleavages) accelerated during in the 2000s (Sherlock 2009), the 2014 elections saw the

resurgence of aliran-based older parties (Fionna and Tomsa, 2017) with Diego Fossati (2016)

arguing this showed that traditional socio-cultural constituencies remain largely in place. Desite

these debates about how strong aliran-based identities remain, when viewed comparatively,

culturalist cleavages that cross-cut class differences in Indonesia remain much more significant

than in the Philippines or Thailand (Ufen 2012). These ethno-religious identities make poor

Indonesians less susceptible to the ‘temptations’ of populist appeals. Although appeals to poor

voters have been made on occasion - such as during Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s successful re-

election bid in 2009 (Mietzner, 2009) – it did not involve the employment of an ‘uncaring

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establishment elite’ rhetoric that both Estrada and Thaksin had used to bolster their electoral

support among poor voters.

A former general accused of numerous human rights violations turned strongman

presidential candidate, Prabowo Subianto, challenged Indonesia’s democratic institutions during

the 2014 presidential election campaign. But he was narrowly defeated by a moderate, Joko

Widodo (‘Jokowi’), maintaining democratic stability in the country (Aspinall 2015). Marcus

Mietzner (2014) has argued Indonesia escaped the regional (and worldwide) trend of democratic

reversal because of a stable economy and overall satisfaction with the democratic system despite

the obvious discontent of many voters, with Prabowo’s radicalism repelling moderates and

Jokowi’s status as a political outsider enabling him to win over voters desiring reforms but not

regime change. Despite facing numerous challenges, including within his own adopted political

party, Jokowi was able to overcome recalcitrance in the legislature led by allies of his defeated

rival, showing that in Indonesia, like the Philippines, gridlock is not a common feature of

presidentialism. Jokowi was able to consolidate his authority by the middle of 2016, winning

high approval ratings as he focused on economic reforms, particularly infrastructural

development and deregulation (Warburton 2017).

Recently, however, a new threat to Indonesian democracy emerged when radical

Islamists accused the once popular ethnic Chinese and Christian politician Basuki Tjahaja

Purnama (known as Ahok) of blaspheming Islam, undermining Ahok’s election bid to remain

Jakarta governor and leading to his jailing after he was found guilty on these flimsy charges.

Observers again saw the handiwork of Prabowo in the background who allied with the Islamists

(Russell 2017), suggesting ‘the biggest threat to Indonesian democracy – and its conventional

tendency towards moderation – comes from a possible alliance of the Islamist and

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ultranationalist populists, which could occur as early as for the 2019 presidential elections’

(Mietzner 2017). Some observers expect the ‘quintessentially mainstream’ Jokowi to again

prevail in the next presidential election as (thus far) positive economic conditions matter more

than appeals to extreme forms of religious identity (Siu 2017). But should a Prabowo or a similar

candidate win Indonesia’s next presidential election with a combination of Islamist and

nationalist appeals, it could indeed lead not a shift to growing illiberalism and even outright

authoritarianism, as the Philippine example suggests.

This does indeed point to a potential danger of a ‘winner take all’ system of presidential

elections which can shift politics in a radically new direction, particularly when legislators are

open to patronage inducements from the chief executive. Yet this is not necessarily a

distinguishing feature of presidentialism. As the case of parliamentary Thailand, a strong headed

leader (Thaksin) exercised imperious leadership according to his critics (who then engineered his

downfall). This example of ‘perilous parliamentarianism’ is why much of the newer research on

democratic consolidation has moved away from a focus on the gridlock said to be characteristic

of presidentialism, to an emphasis on the dangers posed by overly powerful and ambitious

elected leaders who attempt use their democratic legitimacy to undermine liberal constraints,

which is as likely to happen under parliamentary rule as under presidentialism (Cheibub 2014).

Conclusion

The Philippine presidential system has gone through several cycles of instability since

independence in 1946 (Hedman, 2006): Marcos’ dictatorial rule for nearly a decade a half until

his overthrow and the restoration of electoral democracy in 1986 which in turn saw two post-

Marcos presidents face repeated coup attempts (Cory Aquino and Arroyo), one removed from

power ‘extra-constitutionally” (Estrada) and the current president as of this writing, Duterte,

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30

ruling in an illiberal fashion. But the fact that Philippine national political leaders have

sometimes been imperious (as dictators or at least highly illiberal rulers) and/or imperilled (due

to attempts to topple them) is not a distinct feature of presidentialism when viewed

comparatively in Southeast Asia. In parliamentary Thailand, Thaksin set up an increasingly

transgressive political regime, undermining horizontal checks to his power. He was overthrown

by a ‘people power putsch’ in 2006 similar to the one which toppled Estrada in 2001 (with

Thaksin’s anointed successors as prime minister removed from power in 2008 and overthrown in

another coup in 2014). On the other, Indonesia’s post-authoritarian system (with one president

removed from office, but following constitutional procedure, while none of the others acting in

an obviously transgressive fashion toward liberal democracy) shows that presidentialism in the

region can be relatively stable.

As an example of ‘pure’ presidentialism because of the strict separation between the

president and congress without any features semi-parliamentarism, the Philippines is an apt case

study for ‘first wave’ presidentialism theory which claims presidential rule to be more

destabilizing than parliamentary. Indeed, in the Philippines it appears that competing legitimacy

claims between the president and the legislature contributed to the downfall of Joseph E. Estrada

in 2001. Yet Estrada was effectively removed from office by extra-electoral elite strategic groups

who initiated a civilian uprising against him and supported the military which ultimately forced

him to step down. Without any such gridlock with the legislature (which he controlled through

his overwhelming parliamentary majority), Thailand’s Thaksin faced a similar kind of elite

opposition that led to his downfall in a manner reminiscent of Estrada’s. Presidentialism did not

doom Estrada any more than parliamentarianism did Thaksin – the hostility of, and mobilization

by elite strategic groups did in both of them.

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31

On the other hand, the concept of ‘delegative democracy’ helps elucidate the hegemonic

position of Philippine presidents generally while revealing the political opportunity that existed

for imperious-minded presidents, Marcos and Duterte, to undermine even these weakened checks

and balances. Yet when examined regionally this second peril also finds a striking parallels in

parliamentary Thailand where Thaksin and his surrogates also often acted in a clearly

transgressive fashion toward liberal democracy. The Indonesian case, by contrast, has proved to

be a relatively stable presidential system that has suffered neither from elite-led coups nor

overweening chief executives who undermined horizontal accountability. Despite also having a

relatively ‘pure’ presidential system, Indonesia’s electoral democratic system has been the most

stable in Southeast Asia over the past fifteen years even if potential threats to the system’s

stability have recently emerged. But like in the Philippines, such dangers have little to do with

potential gridlock between the president and the legislature, but rather with the dangers posed by

imperious populist leaders who abuse their already extensive powers under ‘delegative

democracy’ to completely undermine liberal norms and the rule of law, which can occur as easily

under parliamentary as presidential rule (Cheibub 2014).

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1

The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective:

Imperiled and Imperious Presidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

Abstract (140 words)

Among the neglected cases of presidential systems in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is

particularly interesting as the oldest in the region and as a ‘pure’ case of presidentialism which

provides seemingly strong evidence for its ‘perilousness’. ‘First wave’ presidentialism theory

appears to explain how competing legitimacy claims between a president and the legislature

contributed to the downfall of a sitting president (Joseph E. Estrada in 2001). Yet, Philippine

presidents have usually dominated other branches of government. O’Donnell’s concept of

‘delegative democracy’ helps elucidate the hegemonic position of Philippine presidents generally

and sheds light on the illiberally transgressive nature of the Marcos and Duterte presidencies in

particular. When these twin perils of imperiled and imperious presidents are examined

regionally, however, striking parallels are apparent in parliamentary Thailand while the

Indonesian case provides a contrasting example of a relatively stable presidential system.

Key words – Philippines, presidentialism, delegative democracy

The Philippine Presidency in Southeast Asian Perspective:

Imperiled and Imperious Presidents but not Perilous Presidentialism

Among the relatively neglected cases of presidential systems of government and their impact on

democratic stability in relevant Southeast Asia countries (exceptions are Bolongaita, 1995;

Fukuyama, Dressel, and Chang, 2005; Rüland, Jurgenmeyer, Nelson, and Ziegenhain, 2005;

Kasuya 2013), the Philippines is a particularly interesting one. It is the oldest presidential system

in Asia. The Philippines has had 16 presidents during five Republics and a Commonwealth

established under US ‘colonial democracy’ (Paredes 1989) and after independence (a period

marked by two electorally democratic and one dictatorial period): Emilio Aguinaldo, the

president of the revolutionary ‘Malolos republic’ government in 1899, Manuel Quezon chief

executive under the Commonwealth Constitution in 1935, two presidents during and

Manuscript - anonymous

2

immediately after Japanese occupation of WWII (Second Republic), six presidents after

independence (Third Republic) and before Ferdinand E. Marcos’s declaration of martial law in

1972 which initiated a 14 year dictatorship (with a French-style semi-presidential façade in a

Fourth Republic), and six post-Marcos presidents during the Fifth Republic, with the current

president Rodrigo R. Duterte elected in May 2016.

It is also an example of ‘pure’ presidentialism characterized by a separately elected

president and congress with fixed terms and a strict institutional separation between the chief

executive and the legislature (Cheibub 2014; Stepan and Skach, 1993, 17-18), without features of

semi-presidentialism which involve a president ruling alongside a prime minister and cabinet

which are responsible to the legislature (Elgie 2011).

This ‘purity’ makes it a good case to assess the explanatory power of the ‘perils of

presidentialism’ thesis. Two Philippine presidents were removed extra-constitutionally by

‘people power’ uprisings, Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 and Joseph E. Estrada in 2001 (with the

important difference that Marcos led an electoral authoritarian regime while Estrada was freely

and fairly elected). In addition, Marcos declared martial law in 1972, leading to the breakdown

of democracy while the current Philippine president, Rodrigo R. Duterte, has, as of this writing,

on several occasions threatened to declare martial law nationally (and has already done so in the

island of Mindanao) (Holmes and Thompson 2017). Moreover, both Corazon (‘Cory’) C. Aquino

(president from 1986 to1992) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (president from 2001 to 2010) faced

repeated coup attempts by disgruntled military elements backed by key politicians and leaders in

‘civil society’.

Presidentialism can be seen as ‘perilous’ to the Philippines’ democratic stability in two

ways. On the one hand, there was an important case of deadlock between the legislature and the

3

chief executive that contributed to the extra-constitutional removal of Estrada in 2001. Yet such

an impasse between the legislative and executive branches has been the exception in the

Philippine context where patronage controlled by the president usually insures strong

congressional majorities for the incumbent. This points to another aspect of presidentialism to be

found at the opposite end of the spectrum of ‘perilousness’. Rather than being stymied by the

legislature with competing legitimacy claims leading to political crisis, instability, and

breakdown, presidents with massive formal and informal powers in the Philippines have usually

been able to subordinate the other two branches government, creating the danger of ‘elected

autocracy’ or even outright dictatorship. This peril can be seen to have contributed to Marcos’

declaration of martial law in 1972 and has also been flagged as a danger during Duterte’s early

presidency (Thompson 2016a).

The two perils can be seen as related to what Guillermo O’Donnell has dubbed

‘delegative democracy’ (O’Donnell, 1994 and 1998): unconsolidated democracies in which the

mechanisms of horizontal accountability are easily overridden through an informal

understanding of power in which ‘whoever wins the presidency’ claims entitlement ‘to govern as

he or she sees fit’ (ibid., 1994, p. 59). There is an implicit spectrum of behavioral choices within

this concept as not all presidents will use weakened checks and balances to try to monopolize

power. But there are likely to be ‘transgressive’ presidents who seize the opportunity to make

full use of their informal authority in an attempt to override even the weak checks remaining on

their power. But presidents who do go beyond the wide bounds of delegative democracy often

face a showdown with the legislature and the courts. The result is political instability and often a

major constitutional crisis (Shugart and Carey, 1992 and Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997).

4

Electoral democracy is likely to be threatened either of a ‘defensive’ coup of the president’s

enemies or by an autogolpe by the president himself.

Yet when compared across Southeast Asian, these twin perils that have beset the

Philippines of imperious political leaders threatening to overturn electoral democracy or those

leaders imperiled by mass protests led by opponents accusing them of power abuse find striking

parallels in parliamentary Thailand. In that mainland Southeast Asia nation Thaksin Shinawatra

and his surrogates, who often acted against liberal principles in a transgressive fashion, were

toppled by powerful elite groups in a manner similar to Estrada’s downfall. The Indonesian case,

by contrast, shows a relatively stable presidential system that has neither suffered neither from

elite-led coups nor overweening chief executives who undermined horizontal accountability.

The initial section of this paper considers how ‘first wave’ presidentialism theory of Linz

and his collaborators appears to explain the way competing legitimacy claims contributed to the

overthrow of Estrada as a key example of an imperiled president in the Philippines. Upon closer

examination, however, it is evident elite societal actors were crucial in the actual toppling of

Estrada and that gridlock between the chief executive and the legislature is exceptional in the

patronage-drive Philippine political system. The second section examines how the concept of

‘delegative democracy’, which can be seen as a sub-set of the anti-presidentialism argument,

helps elucidate the imperious nature of the Marcos and Duterte presidencies as well as the

overweening powers of Philippine presidents generally. The third section, however, suggests

when looking at other Southeast Asian cases, the institutional explanation of presidentialist

instability in the Philippines proves inutile. Under similar political circumstances, Thaksin and

his surrogates were removed from office by powerful elite ‘strategic groups’. Before Thaksin lost

power as prime minister, he had erected a transgressive form of ‘delegative democracy’. In

5

Indonesia, by contrast, the presidential system has been relatively stable. One president was

removed from office, but according to constitutional guidelines and without causing major

political unrest, while none of the other post-Suharto presidents have been clearly transgressive

in their exercise of executive power.

Perilous Philippine presidentialism I: gridlock

The ‘first wave’ of the presidentialism literature has the advantage of making clear claims about

the differential impact of presidential or parliamentary systems on the degree of democratic

stability (Elgie, 2005). Juan J. Linz, who revived the ‘perilous presidentialism’ thesis, argued that

despite there being varieties of presidential and parliamentary systems, there are ‘fundamental

differences’ between them, with democratic presidential systems more likely to break down than

parliamentary ones. Linz argued that separate elections as well as the rigidity created by the fixed

terms of the president and members of congress are the two key aspects of presidentialism, with

other ‘characteristics and problems’ of presidentialism deriving from these ‘essential features’

(Linz, 1994, 4-6). Seconding this argument, Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach (1993, 17-18) argue

that the ‘essence of pure presidentialism is mutual independence’ of the chief executive and

legislature, with gridlock between the two branches of government more likely to cause

instability than in a unitary parliamentary system where no such potential conflict exists.

At this point it becomes apparent that applying the perilous presidentialism argument to

the Philippine case is difficult. Despite two important institutional idiosyncrasies (a separately

elected vice president and a nationally elected senate), the Philippines is a relatively straight

forward example of presidentialism with a strict separation between the chief executive and the

legislature. These two peculiarities of the Philippine political system do not affect the strict

institutional separation of the executive and legislature. But the nationally elected senate (with

6

senators serving six year terms, the same as the president) has proved somewhat less vulnerable

to presidential pressure (primarily through patronage) than members of the lower house elected

in local districts for two years. A separately elected vice president may also prove a hindrance

(albeit a minor one given the limited powers of the vice presidency) to a ‘transgressive’ president

trying to undermine even the weak checks of ‘delegative democracy’.

Yet important informal elements of Philippine politics make gridlock between the chief

executive and legislative branch relatively rare. Crucially in this respect, Philippine parties are

quite ‘weak’ in that they are ‘under-instititutionalized’ along both external/systemic and

internal/organizational dimensions (Hicken, in press; Manasca and Tan, 2005). Externally,

interparty competition is fluid and parties are not accepted by voters/significant social groups as

either legitimate in or necessary for the functioning of the political system (ibid.). Internally, it is

clear that parties lack strong societal roots and do not have or uphold clear and distinctive party

platforms. Instead, platforms are more like ‘motherhood statements passed off as political

programmes’ (Quimpo, 2007, 277). Allen Hicken (in press) argues that in the Philippines

‘organizationally parties tend to be feeble, factionalized, and fleeting’. Parties are controlled by

country's oligarchic elite and ‘are built around personalities, rather than around political

programmes or platforms’ with ideologies and platforms…just adornments for them’ (Quimpo,

2007, 277). There is little internal discipline as parties are merely electoral vehicles for

candidates who use clientelistic networks, not programmatic appeals to win votes. Thus there is

no incentive to invest in upgrading party organization or elaborating party programmes. Given

weak loyalty of both party members and candidates to ‘their parties’, party switching is common

with multiple memberships common (Ufen 2012, 455-56). Summing up parties’ weakness in the

Philippines with rhetorical flourish, Nathan Quimpo (2007) suggests: ‘Far from being stable

7

organizations [Philippine parties] have proven to be nebulous entities that can be set up, merged

with others, split, resurrected, regurgitated, reconstituted, renamed, repackaged, recycled, or

flushed down the toilet any time.’

Although generally seen as harmful to the quality of Philippine democracy due to the lack

of accountability to the electorate strong parties help provide, there is a ‘positive’ aspect of the

Philippines’ weak party system when viewed from the vantage point of the potential perils of

presidentialism. Because parties are weak, the gridlock seen as characteristic of many

presidential systems seldom occurs in the Philippines. Instead, Philippine observers speak of the

balimbing (the many side fruit) effect or ‘political butterfly’ phenomenon, meaning that would-

be turncoat politicians can easily change sides/’fly’ from one party to another (De Guzman,

2012, Fernandez, 2016)). This explains why in every post-Marcos presidential election, the

winning presidential candidate has easily assembled a large legislative majority, even if the new

chief executive belonged to a small political party.

Party-switching was particularly obvious after the election of Rodrigo R. Duterte as

president in May 2016. Although Duterte came to power with what can fairly be termed a

‘micro-party’ (Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan, Philippine Democratic Party-

Power of the People) with only one senator and three seats in the House of Representatives, it

soon become the ruling coalition through a familiar process of defections to the winning

president’s side. As a result of post-election party-switching, however, he was able to assemble a

200-plus supermajority to back his ally Pantaleon ‘Bebot’ Alvarez’s bid for House speaker

Similarly, Aquilino ‘Koko’ Pimentel, Jr., the lone PDP-Laban senator, was elected president of

the Senate (Romero, 2016). This mass turncoatism occurred despite warnings by the once

dominant Liberal Party during the campaign that Duterte planned to erect a dictatorship, showing

8

how even parties claiming to be ‘programmatic’ yield to their members’ demands to be included

in presidential patronage distribution to Congress (Cupin, 2017).

The incumbent president is able to cultivate a loose coalition of individual legislators and

particularistic blocs on guarantees of easier and bigger access to choice ‘pork barrel funds’ and

special budgetary appropriations. Rivera (1998, 255–56) notes, ‘the presidency’s clout in this

process derives from its control over the releases of crucial budgetary appropriations including

the ‘pork barrel’ funds of individual legislators in both Houses of Congress, and it is this singular

power of the presidency over the disbursement of funds that makes both Houses vulnerable to

presidential initiatives and agenda setting in law making.’

As distasteful as ‘pork barreling’ may appear (Holmes, in press), it does not explain why

presidentialism has been perilous in the Philippines. There is no gridlock resulting in a zero sum

conflict between two elected branches of government each claiming their own, distinct electoral

legitimacy. Rather, critics often see the Philippine legislature and Congress working too closely

together, with Congress not providing an adequate check on executive authority and the

president engaging in legalized bribery through the allocation of pork barrel to legislators

(Mendoza, 2010; Holmes, in press), again underlining the ‘delegative’ character of Philippine

democracy.

So why did president Joseph Estrada become an imperiled president who was forced out

of office extra-constitutionally in 2001? Estrada, a movie star turned pro-poor populist politician

easily won the 1998 presidential elections and soon won over a comfortable majority in both the

house and senate after taking office. However, less than three years after taking office Estrada

was impeached by the lower house, unprecedented in the history of the Philippine presidency.

9

Yuko Kasuya (2005) has offered an ingenious explanation of Estrada’s impeachment in

November 2000 with a significant number of the house members voting for the resolution

coming from his own party, the Lapiang ng Masang Pilipino (Party of the Filipino Masses, or

LAMP). Through regression analysis, she found that the decision by LAMP legislators to vote

for impeachment was primarily influenced by how much patronage they had received from

Estrada in the past or their expectation of how much they would receive in the future. More

specifically, she found that the party switchers, i.e. those who had joined Estrada’s LAMP after

his victory in the 1998 presidential election victory, were more likely to endorse impeachment

bill than those already in the party before then. She claims the latecomers had received less

patronage from Estrada and thus felt less loyal. A second factor Kasuya points to is that those

LAMP members who faced a looming term limit (legislators are limited to three consecutive

three year terms) were also more likely to vote against Estrada because they placed less value on

future patronage than those members able to run for an additional term did (ibid., p. 521).

As plausible as these explanations appear, they run into difficulty upon closer

examination. Kasuya assumes that the degree of some legislators’ loyalty to Estrada was based

on past patronage while that of others was determined by future events (whether facing a term

limit or not). But these explanations appear mutually exclusive. If one feels loyal to the president

due to past patronage, one would expect that loyalty to continue regardless of term limits in the

future. A second point related to the issue of term limits is that although they were designed to

limit the power of political families in the Philippines by forcing them to leave office after a set

number of terms, it has been shown many members of the lower house are replaced in power

(standing and usually winning in the next election) by a close family member (Querubin 2011).

Pablo Querubin (2011, 3-4) has argued that in fact ‘term limits may have the perverse effect of

10

strengthening political dynasties’ which led term-limited incumbents to bring ‘additional family

members into politics’ making ‘dynasties more powerful as a family then controls multiple

offices simultaneously’. Given the importance of political dynasties in the Philippines (McCoy

1994), it can be expected that family members pass on loyalty in regard to patronage relations

even as they switch places in the legislature. Thus expectations of future patronage may well

extend beyond a term limit to the next member of the family designated to replace the departing

legislator.

A third factor is Estrada’s view of the situation himself. In an interview with this author,

Estrada claimed he did not request loyalty from lower house members during the impeachment

process, allowing them to take an open vote (Estrada 2015). Instead he only demanded loyalty of

senators to stay in office. That the senate did in fact stay loyal to Estrada appears to confirm his

claim. The impeachment charge was never actually put to a vote about whether to convict

Estrada and remove him from office. Estrada’s supporters were able to suppress what was

considered by advocates of impeachment to be a crucial piece of evidence, leading the latter

group to abandon the process altogether.

But while Kusaya’s patronage-based explanation runs into difficulties, it does contribute

to the overall argument that a conflict between a president and a legislature in a presidential

system can be politically destabilizing because both can plausibly claim to represent the people

through their direct election to office. This problem of competing legitimacies is worsened in the

Philippine case because, like the president, senators are also elected nationally. This brings us

back to arguably Linz’s most persuasive indictment against presidentialism: that there is no way

to determine whether the legislature or the chief executive are the ‘true’ representatives of the

11

people and thus there is not democratically legitimate way to resolve conflicts between the two

branches of government.

As mentioned above, after his impeachment in the lower house in November 2000,

Estrada was not convicted by the senate. But Estrada’s impeachment and failed conviction

clearly did trigger the elite-led protests that ultimately led to Estrada’s downfall. Initially it was

the Catholic Church hierarchy that had campaigned hardest against Estrada. They were soon

joined by major business leaders, many of whom had close ties to the Catholic Bishops. Later

civil society activists, particularly students, played a key part in organizing protests and bringing

out large crowds. But Estrada was only doomed when top generals also withdrew their support

(Landé 2001; Abinales and Amoroso 2005, 275–77; Thompson 2014).

Estrada’s successor to the presidency, vice-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was a

master of patronage politics. But even she was not able to stop the populist juggernaut of

Fernando Poe Jr. - Estrada’s friend and even more popular movie star politician in 2004.

Enjoying the strong backing of elite groups who feared Poe, Arroyo turned to electoral

manipulation to ensure her victory in that election (Raquiza 2005). Arroyo paid for her electoral

wrongdoings, however, when she was later caught on tape apparently discussing voter

manipulation in the 2004 national election with then election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano.

This so-called Hello Garci scandal of mid 2005 revealed the extent of the cheating involved and

resulted in a further loss in her popular support. This led to a major legitimacy crisis resulting in

repeated military coup attempts with civilian backing (Teehankee 2016a). But besides her ability

to consolidate control over the legislature through the familiar instruments of patronage

distribution discussed above, Arroyo was also able to cling to power because three of the

12

country’s chief extra-electoral strategic groups1—big business, the Catholic Church hierarchy,

and the military brass – continued to support her despite vehement opposition to her presidency

by the fourth group, civil society activists, ranging from liberals, to social democrats, to the

above-ground organizations of the communist left (Abinales 2006). She was also able to fend off

repeated impeachment attempts through her control of the lower house. Political instability

during the Arroyo administration thus had nothing to do with gridlock and everything to do with

the legitimacy crisis she faced after being seen to usurp the presidency from Estrada (who though

hated by the elite was still loved by the masa, poor voters, as polls showed) which worsened with

revelations she had manipulated of the 2004 presidential polls.

Like Arroyo, the first post-Marcos president, Cory Aquino had also faced repeated

military coups but this also does not fit into the ‘gridlock’ explanation, with her difficulties being

due to the transitional situation in which pro-Marcos elements and military rebels tried to

overthrow her in a series of coups. In fact, although coup threats continued Aquino was able to

peel away layers of opposition by holding elections, with key personalities choosing electoralism

over insurrectionism (Thompson 1995, ch 9). Once electoral democracy was fully restored at all

levels via a plebiscite for a new constitution (1987), legislative and local elections (1988) and

village (barangay) elections (1989), the system began to stabilize. In another words, it was a

fully functional presidential system that stabilized democracy. The system stabilized further with

1 Strategic groups are not reducible to a social class (e.g., the bourgeoisie) that form a homogenous ruling elite

(Evers 1973). As group consciousness emerges in a society, heterogeneous elite groups begin to act strategically to

accumulate power resources and attempt to influence state policy. Strategic groups have elitist leaderships

(sometimes hierarchical, in other cases decentralized) with a lower-level membership, clientele, or mass base. These

groups are distinguished by their different power resources: in the case of the military force/coercion, for big

business capital/property, and for religious leaders a widespread belief system. These groups may unite around a

program of political action based on common interests and ideological commitments (Berner 1995). As extra-

electoral power brokers, strategic groups can buttress or challenge the power of elected politicians, the president in

particular. On the role of business as a strategic group see Fukuoka (2015) and Hedman (2006). Hedman also

discusses the role of the Catholic church (in addition see Barry 2006) and the military (also see Hall 2004) as well as

stressing the role of the U.S. in intra-elite conflict.

13

the election of Fidel Ramos in the 1992 elections, despite Ramos winning fewer than a fourth of

the votes in a one round, multi-party electoral system (Teehankee 2016a). The narrow margin of

victory was not as significant as the fact that now all offices in the system had been elected

relatively freely and fairly. Ramos also enjoyed strong elite support, which helps explain why his

presidency was stable, unlike his successor Estrada who would be overthrown in an uprisings led

not just by opposition politicians but also by key extra-electoral elite strategic groups,

particularly the Catholic church, big business, civil society activists, and, ultimately, the military

(Thompson 2008). What has destabilized the Philippine presidency is not gridlock with the

legislature but opposition by powerful societal elite groups.

Perilous presidentialism II: Delegative democracy

Given the problematic character of the ‘gridlock’ argument for explaining how presidentialism

has contributed to political instability in the Philippines, some analysts of the Philippine

presidentialism have turned to what is in a sense the opposite argument - a ‘delegative’

presidency (Ronas 2016). As discussed above, for O’Donnell democracies which are ‘delegative’

are unconsolidated political systems because the mechanics of horizontal accountability are

subverted by the informal powers of the executive. While O’Donnell (1996 and 1998) does not

specify presidentialism as a necessary characteristic of ‘delegative democracy’, his chief

examples of this phenomenon are drawn from presidential regimes in Latin America and he

argues that winning ‘presidential candidates in DDs [delegative democracies] present themselves

as above both political parties and organized interests’ (O’Donnell 1994, 60) meaning that

‘whoever wins the presidency’ claims entitlement ‘to govern as he or she sees fit’ (ibid., p. 59).

Thus, ‘[c]learly, presidentialism has more affinity with DD than parliamentarianism’ (O’Donnell

1994, 67, n. 11). O’Donnell seems to be implying here that delegative democracy is a sub-set of

14

presidentialism. He makes a point though of adding (1994, 16, n. 11) that the workings of

parliamentary systems can also be subverted if ‘delegative propensities are strong’, a point

discussed below in the case of Thailand.

While influenced by the U.S. model, the Philippines has more closely followed the Latin

American example of ‘strong presidents’ given the strong fiscal prerogatives and coercive

powers of the chief executives of this Southeast Asian nation (Teehankee 2016a, 294). Philippine

presidents have much more formal power than their U.S. counterparts given their wide discretion

over budgetary matters, right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (and even in the post-Marcos

constitution to declare martial law unilaterally, although subject to scrutiny from the supreme

court and congress), ability to circumvent legislative and judicial constraints, and their

domination of the theoretically independent regulatory and oversight agencies mentioned above.

Susan Rose-Ackerman and Diane Desierto (2011) see the Philippines as a case of ‘hyper-

presidentialism’, with Emil Bolongaita Jr (1995, 110) even arguing that ‘among presidential

democracies, the Philippine president virtually has no equal in terms of aggregate executive

power.’ In Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart’s terms (1997, 449) the Philippines is an

example of the least functional form of presidentialism given the strength of presidential

legislative powers and the lack of disciplined parties.

Instead of suggesting the system is destabilized by a fight for dominance of the political

system based on competing claims of electoral legitimation between the president and the

legislature, the claim of the ‘delegative presidentialism’ critique is that because Philippine

presidents are so hegemonic they can relegate the legislature, the courts, and independent bodies

to subordinate status despite their theoretically being co-equal branches of government or

constitutionally mandated agencies. Because the president can encroach on the authority of other

15

government bodies, horizontal accountability is undermined in delegative democracy

(O’Donnell, 1998, 117).

The reason presidential power can be so easily abused goes back to an argument made

above in regard to the rareness of gridlock between the chief executive and the legislature. With

patronage resources concentrated in the presidency, the president becomes ‘patron-in-chief’

(Thompson, 2014, 235). Given the extraordinary powers the Philippine president possesses over

the budget and the extensive clientelist ties evident in Philippine politics, the president is the

effective dispenser of patronage which is crucial for influencing legislative decision-making.

This power of the patronage purse tends to undermine trust in government as public good is

subordinated to private gain (Ronas 2016, 82). A number of key scandals among post-Marcos

presidents can be attributed to the weak horizontal accountability of Philippine President (Ronas

2016, 82). Presidents appear to be above the law due to their immunity from suits, the limited

ability of the judiciary to check them,2 and because it is so difficult to remove the chief executive

from office through impeachment/conviction (as we saw above, despite ferocious opposition,

even Estrada could not constitutionally be removed from power because of the unwillingness of

the senate to convict him). Presidents’ influence over state institutions extends to the military

which they can use to declare emergency rule or even martial law. Malaya C. Ronas (2016, 81)

sums up this indictment of Philippine presidentialism this way: ‘…the President’s authority [is]

nearly ubiquitous in the entire state apparatus’.

2 An important exception is the 2013 Supreme Court decision that the Priority Development and Assistance Fund

(PDAF), the chief vehicle or presidential patronage to the legislature was unconstitutional. But then president

Benigno S. ‘Noynoy’ Aquino, III managed to partially circumvent this decision by distributing funds directly to

congressional districts. Earlier court rulings (as well as public protests and press campaigns) against presidential-

legislative pork barrel also did not led to the abolition of the practice. Not surprisingly, since then pork barrel has not

only returned under the current Duterte administration but has been substantially increased (Porcalla 2016).This has

led Ronald Holmes (in press) to argue the pork barrel in the Philippines is continuously “transmogrified”, defying

efforts to abolish it.

16

It has been argued that one factor for the ‘extraordinary power’ of Philippine presidents

rests on the need of politician oligarchs who have supported a presidential campaign to be repaid

in kind through patronage distribution (Van de Loo, 2004). Yet it can also be argued that a strong

presidency finds justification in a system divided along particularistic lines by local elites. In the

complex political network in which the president plays the role of ‘patron-in-chief’ both appear

to be true – the president-as-debt payer and the president-as-uniter. Newly elected presidents are

concerned to repay their chief supporters as well as use patronage to attract new allies.

Yet this is not to claim that presidents-as-kingpins’ necessarily become dictators. While

O’Donnell (1994, p. 56) argues ‘delegative democracies’ are unlikely to be on a path to full

representative democracy, he also insists that they are also not necessarily threatened by

authoritarian regression. This means that separate consideration must be given to presidents in a

delegative democracy who do become obviously illiberal. In the Philippines, not all presidents

have taken full advantage of the opportunity offered by ‘delegative democracy’ to use the

weakness of checks and balances to consolidate their power beyond democratic bounds. In this

sense they are ‘non-transgressive’ toward electoral democracy. One clear example was Cory

Aquino who, despite her extraordinary powers at the beginning of the presidency when she

abolished the Marcos constitution and replaced local officials loyal to the fallen dictator, she did

not herself establish a dictatorship. Nor did she use her control of Congress (once elections were

held in 1987) through patronage to attempt to stay in power beyond the end of her term in 1992

despite ambiguity about whether the one term limit set by the new constitution applied to her

given the extra-constitutional circumstances of her rise to power (Thompson 1995, ch 9).

But there have been Philippine presidents who have attempted to make full use of their

informal authority, threatening to overturn liberal democracy and forcing a showdown with those

17

opposed to their ambitions. Thus although the powers of all Philippines presidents – formal and

informal – are substantial, two chief executives stand out as exercising this authority over other

governmental actors in an outright authoritarian or at least in an increasingly illiberal manner.

The first is of course Ferdinand Marcos, a legally elected president (in 1965, re-elected in 1969)

who declared martial law in 1972 and who remained the unchallenged authoritarian leader of the

country until he was overthrown in 1986. The second is the current president of the Philippines

as of this writing, Rodrigo Duterte, who although not yet an outright dictator, is a strongman

ruler who has already violated the rule of law in number of ways as well as declaring martial law

at a regional level while threatening to do so nationally (Holmes and Thompson 2017;

Teehankee and Thompson 2016). Marcos’ martial rule led to a breakdown of Philippine

democracy; Duterte represents the most serious threat since the redemocratization of the country

three decades ago. These two presidencies took the Philippines’ ‘delegative presidency’ to its

extreme conclusion: dictatorship, or at least a credible threat thereof. While ‘delegative’ in terms

of hegemony over the legislature through patronage and generally able to override possible

checks by the courts and independent agencies, the post-Marcos Philippine presidential system

remained ‘liberal reformist’ until the rise of Duterte due to regular competitive elections (vertical

accountability), the need to channel presidential patronage through the legislature, the relative

independence of the military from presidential authority, and a general respect for the rule of law

(at least at the national level). In order to understand the nature of this argument completely, how

both of these presidencies overcame these constraints as well need to be briefly examined.

Marcos was the Filipino Caesar. Even before he declared martial law in 1972 –

establishing an authoritarian regime that survived until 1986 – he had become the most powerful

18

president since independence in 1946.3 He took the powers available to a Philippine president

and used them to their maximum extent, expanding them continuously during his legal term in

office (1966-1972). Although costs of campaigns did increase significantly before Marcos, with

government spending in the red during campaign years, Marcos ran deficits even in non-election

years to fund a huge infrastructure projects that were distributed to achieve maximum political

advantage (Doronila 1985). But Marcos was not just content to buy off politicians and voters, he

also made sure he had the armed forces tightly under his personal control, undertaking the largest

reorganization of the military the country had ever experienced, promoting his loyalists and

relatives to the highest levels (Berlin 1982). Marcos further reshuffled top military commanders

shortly before declaring martial law to insure their absolute loyalty. The so called ‘Rolex

Twelve’ (each given that Swiss watch by Marcos) helped plan martial law months in advance.

Marcos also increased the size of the armed forces considerably and doubled its budget

(Brillantes 1987, 37-47). He also won the ‘hearts and minds’ of military officers with a survey

showing most favored emergency rule before Marcos actually declared martial law (Canoy 1984,

23). Yet opposition remained, in the ‘parliament of the streets’ (major leftwing student protests)

and in congress, particularly the senate where opposition senators spoke out strongly against the

regime until martial law (Thompson 1995, ch 2).

Under martial rule, elections were cancelled, congress abolished, the supreme court

intimidated and a new constitution put in place (in a pseudo referendum conducted by a show of

hands in local barangays). Although Marcos revived elections in 1978, he had by then

3 Marcos’ presidency did, however, resemble Manuel Quezon’s Commonwealth administration. Quezon used the

powers of patronage during the late colonial era in which domestic power had been returned to Filipinos to control

the legislature and politicians generally while holding the judiciary and military under his sway to such an extent

that his became a quasi-authoritarian regime, providing a precedent for Marcos’s establishment of a full-fledged

dictatorship (McCoy 1988).

19

established a dominant ruling party with the opposition cheated in the legislative polls, leading

most of them to boycott the 1981 presidential elections. Only after the assassination of

opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. in August 1983, did widespread protest and foreign

pressure (particularly from the U.S.) force Marcos to alklow elections to be more competitive,

enabling those oppositionists who participated in the 1984 legislative polls to perform better than

expected (although the KBL still won a commanding majority). Marcos then called early, ‘snap’

presidential election in 1986 which he officially won but which was widely seen to have been a

‘stolen’ election triggering the ‘people power’ uprising that led to Marcos’ downfall (Kuntz and

Thompson 2009). By abolishing and then undercutting elections, Marcos had destroyed ‘vertical’

accountability to the electorate, going far beyond the delegative presidency model with

weakened ‘horizontal’ accountability.

Marcos may have destroyed Philippine democracy in 1972, but already during the early

months of his administration Duterte had gone far in undermining it (Thompson 2016a). He won

majority support in both houses of congress through the patronage powers of the president

(discussed above), although his control of the lower house is stronger than his control of the

senate - some of Duterte’s fiercest opponents are in the senate, using congressional hearings

about the drug war and smuggling charges linked to the president’s family in an attempt to

embarrass and weaken the president. Duterte did however have chief opponent in the senate,

Leila de Lima, jailed on dubious drug charges. But he still faces push back from the vice

president Maria Leonor ‘Leni’ Robredo, due to another idiosyncrasy of the country’s political

system, a separately elected vice president. While she has taken some high profile stances against

the president on the bloody drug war and the heroes’ burial he granted Marcos (Robredo, like

most post-Marcos vice presidents, was elected from an opposition party), her efforts have fallen

20

short of ‘full-on opposition’ (Pasion 2017). Yet she was still punished for her dissent by being

removed from a cabinet position she held at Duterte’s discretion and, with the very limited

powers of her office, has been able to do little to slow the country’s illiberal turn, with the

president’s supporters (‘Dutertards’) demanding her removal in mass demonstrations and

members of the president’s majority in the lower house considering filing impeachment charges

against her.

Duterte has also cowed the courts, starting with the supreme court, which quickly backed

down after a confrontation over a list of suspected drug-taking judges despite it proving to be

obviously erroneous with Duterte threatening to declare martial law if the court tried to stand in

the way of his drug war (Jerusalem and Ramos, 2016). Although Duterte was elected in free and

fair polls in May 2016 and has formally upheld most political liberties (the press is not censored

and congress and the courts have not been subject to restrictions), the substance of his rule - in

particular orchestrating and encouraging the extra-judicial killing of thousands of supposed drug

dealers and addicts – has been openly illiberal. Thus while Duterte acts illiberally, he is

legitimated democratically and rules to large extent constitutionally (Thompson 2017).

Duterte was able to take advantage of the systemic crisis of this once dominant liberal

reformist political order despite the personal popularity of his predecessor Noynoy Aquino due

to the undermining of the good governance narrative, the discrediting of key extra-electoral elite

strategic groups backing it (particularly the Church and social democrat activists) and the

weakening of liberal institutions (Thompson 2016b). Deploying an illiberal populist ‘order over

law’ (Pepinsky 2017) narrative during his presidential campaign which has become the

governing script of his early presidency, any remaining institutional barriers to this illiberalism

were quickly sidelined with mass defections to his once tiny political party and the timidity of

21

the Supreme Court. Given Dutere’s open contempt for human rights and his violent ‘war on

drugs’, although his promised constitutional overhaul is meant to focus installing federalist it

‘can easily stoke the fear that it is an attempt to reinstate authoritarianism and curtail civil rights

and political freedoms’ (Agugay 2016). There is also speculation that the constitutional

commission – the exact structure of which and membership of have not been announced as of

this writing – will change the Philippines (back) into a French-style semi-presidential system

which was used during the Marcos dictatorship (Cayabyab 2016).Walden Bello (2016) points out

that Duterte has also achieved widespread public support for his strongman rule. Duterte has not

‘feared to transgress liberal discourse [which] not only does…not trouble a significant part of the

population, they’ve even clapped for it!’ Criticized by the Obama administration for massive

human rights violations during the drug war which led Duterte to threaten ‘separation’ from the

U.S. and warm toward the Chinese, Duterte seems to have found a new political friend in the

new U.S. president Donald Trump who has praised the crackdown. Still popular at home and

finding new allies abroad, Duterte uses a strongly nationalist narrative (Teehankee 2016b) and

claims that only violent strongman rule can bring political order to the country (Holmes and

Thompson 2017).

In the Philippines, Marcos and Duterte can be viewed as authoritarian ‘breakthroughs’ in

a ‘delegative’ democratic system with weak checks and balances. The example of the Philippines

appears to show that the delegative democracy characteristic of presidentialism is another aspect

of the potential perilousness of this form of democratic government. In the Philippines, the

presidency has been ‘an institution of uncontested authority, spreading both patronage and

autocratic abuse’ (Dressel 2011, 530-31). In two different historical periods – the early 1970s

22

and the 2010s – determined presidents quickly turned a delegative democracy into an

increasingly illiberal one or even a fully authoritarian system.

Unstable parliamentarianism in Thailand, stable presidentialism in Indonesia

The claim that presidentialism is the differentia specifica explaining the twin perils facing

national leaders imperiled by extra-electoral elite strategic groups and prone to imperious

‘delegative’ rule which can lead to illiberalism or even dictatorship is challenged by data from

other Southeast Asian cases. In Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a ‘people

power putsch’ similar to the toppling of Estrada in the Philippines with Thaksin’s abuse of power

helping generate opposition mobilization which in turn gave the military a pretext for a coup

(Thompson 2008). Indonesia’s democracy, whatever its quality, has persisted despite its

presidential system.

In Thailand, Thaksin’s party easily won the 2001 parliamentary elections. Despite

enjoying a strong majority in parliament without rigid terms of office and winning repeatedly in

a unified electoral system, key societal elites challenged his legitimacy, leading to a civilian

protests and then a militarily enforced ‘people power coup’ in 2006 quite similar in its political

structure to what had happened in the Philippines with the overthrow of Estrada several years

earlier (Thompson 2008). Furthermore, Thaksin’s opponents accused him of taking an imperious

attitude toward his opponents and undermining horizontal checks and balances.

Yet Thaksin’s rise as a populist appeared to be very different from that of Estrada, a

movie star politician who had seamlessly transferred his celluloid image of a tough guy

defending the little guys to a politician promising to help the poor (Hedman 2001). A successful

businessman from a northern provincial Thai family, Thaksin founded the Thai Rak Thai (TRT

or ‘Thais love Thais’) party in 1998 with little foreshadowing of his later populist turn. While

23

Estrada was a ‘natural’ populist, a role he had already played in his movies, Thaksin constructed

his image as a fighter for the poor as elite attacks against him mounted (Pasuk and Baker 2008;

Hewison 2017). Thaksin promised, and delivered, on specific policy commitments to the

underprivileged: agrarian debt relief, low cost universal health care and funds for poor villages.

Once in office, Thaksin outdid any previous prime minister using state-owned media under his

control to launch a weekly radio program to play up his pro-poor activities (Pasuk and Baker,

2008, p. 65). Whether a movie star populist like Estrada or an accidental champion of the

downtrodden like Thaksin, both politicians were able to make effective appeals to poor voters.

Thaksin and Estrada’s pro-poor populism made them targets of heated attacks from elite

strategic groups. In Thailand, ‘yellow shirt’ protestors took to the streets shortly after the pro-

Thaksin party’s overwhelming victory in the 2005 elections, accusing the re-elected prime

minister of massive corruption. Such charges are not new in Thai politics and are often well-

founded (as few seem to doubt they are regarding Thaksin). But it seems unlikely they were the

main reason for the intensity of the largely urban based upper and middle-class based hostility to

Thaksin. Rather, angered by Thaksin’s growing power and his appeals to the poor, an informal

network of the military, bureaucracy, business community, and in elitist ‘civil society’, which

Duncan McCargo terms the ‘network monarchy’ in Thailand (McCargo, 2005), took the

offensive against Thaksin. This alliance elites developed an ‘anti-democratic discourse that

devalued votes and voters that had gained political ascendency’ (Hewison, 2015, 60; also see

Ferrara 2015).

The return of ‘people power’ to the Philippines (with Estrada’s overthrow in 2001) and to

Thailand (the toppling of Thaksin in 2006 occurred after mass protests similar to those which

occurred in 1992 thnmat led to the collapse of military rule then) was elite-driven. Like in the

24

Philippines, elite ‘strategic groups’ in Thailand orchestrated civilian protests which paved the

way for the Thai prime minister’s overthrow by the military (the military had also played a role

in Estrada’s downfall as discussed above) (Thompson 2008). Unlike in the Philippines before

Estrada’ downfall, however, the military coup in Thailand was not preceded by gridlock in the

legislature as Thaksin had overwhelming control of parliament. Yet the political pattern of elite-

led civilian protest leading to military intervention was similar. It might be objected that the role

played by the military in Thailand is much more important than in the Philippines. Although the

Philippine military is certainly less politicized than in Thailand and has never succeeded in

launching a full-fledged military coup, there have been numerous coup attempts from various

factions in the military and the military hierarchy was crucial to the 2001 overthrow of Estrada.

Critics of Thaksin claimed that he had abused the powers of his office. Throughout his

time in office, Thakin was accused of intimidating critics and undermining independent

institutions. For example, he interfered with military promotions, often putting his own relatives

in top positions (Pavin 2011). Thaksin also took on the bureaucracy, challenging the prerogatives

of a number of key ministries and replacing traditional patronage networks with his own political

alliances. In terms of his business dealings, he upset rival tycoons by monopolizing property

deals and government contracts. Thaksin also harassed critical journalists. But one has to be

cautious about taking this elite claim that the overthrow of Thaksin was meant to restore

horizontal accountability too seriously (Slater 2013). Despite their self-proclaimed democratic

motives, Thaksin’s elite critics did not shy from openly supporting military rulers in 2006-07 or

after the 2014 coup.

The trigger for civilian protests was the tax-free sale of Thaksin’s Shin Corp to Temasek,

the Singapore government’s sovereign wealth fund, in 2006 which enabled the so called

25

‘People’s Alliance for Democracy’ (PAD) to win support from the Bangkok middle class. But

more symbolically, the ‘network monarchy’ began to fear that his pro-poor programs were

overshadowing the monarchy’s royal projects to help the poor.

Like the overthrow of Estrada in the Philippines, Thaksin’s fall can be understood in

Gramscian terms in which traditional elites tried to restore their lost hegemony (Hedman 2001).

The network monarchy felt gravely threatened by Thaksin, a populist politician which such

strong ties to poor voters that he easily won elections (with his renamed party even winning the

first post-coup election in late 2007 and again winning the 2011 polls, with his sister governing

as prime minister until her government was overthrown by a further coup in 2014). In Thailand,

like in the Philippines, communalist elites (with royalists claiming similar moral standing

structurally similar to the Catholic Church in the Philippines), business leaders, middle class

activists and the military joined to unseat a leader popular among the poor but hated by these

strategic groups.4

Through what was essentially a people power putsch they removed their rival and

restored their authority through military fiat. Because Thaksin managed to institutionalize his

challenge through his political party (renamed and reorganized each time it was banned) and a

flanking red shirt movement, Thai elites ultimately had to resort to full blown and long term

military rule to suppress the challenge (Pavin 2014). But this had nothing to do with Thailand’s

parliamentary system just as Estrada’s downfall was not the result of presidentialism. It was the

4 A group not discussed in detail here – the above ground communist left which is subsumed under the category of

‘civil society activists’ in this paper – is missing in the Thai case given its defeat by the Thai government in the late

1970s. Although the Philippine left has weakened significantly since 1986 (Abinales 1996), its above ground activist

groups have remained important in civil society protests even as its armed insurgency has ebbed. Yet a stronger far

left in the Philippines had little impact on the dynamics between traditional elites and pro-poor populists in the

Philippines which it is suggested were quite similar to the situation in Thailand.

26

outcome of extreme political polarization between pro-poor populist politicians and their elite

enemies (Thompson 2008, Hewison 2015).

In presidentialist Indonesia, on the other hand, when a major conflict occurred between a

president and the legislature, the chief executive was removed constitutionally (Wahid

Abdurrahman in 2001) without this substantially threatening the stability of the political system.

Furthermore, none of the five post-Suharto Indonesian presidents have proved transgressive

towards liberal democracy despite opting for broad coalitions with limited opposition to win the

cooperation of the legislature which can be seen as the Indonesian version of ‘delegative

democracy’. Critics se it as an inbred system based on an informal cartel of key political parties

which undermines electoral accountability because of voters’ inability to distinguish between

parties colluding together (Mietzner and Aspinall 2010, Sherlock 2010, Slater 2004). Yet similar

to the Philippines, executive distribution of patronage to the legislature has served to stabilize the

political system by avoiding the ‘zero sum character’ of presidentialism which Linz warned

about because even the losers in the presidential elections receive a share of power and patronage

after the polls (Ziegenhain 2015, p. 236).

It is revealing that the removal of Wahid in 2001 occurred through institutional channels

and not as the result of major ‘civil society’ protests. Crucially, there was no major pro-poor

populist challenge to strategic groups in Indonesia nor any major counter-mobilization of middle

class activists instigated by establishment elites as occurred in the Philippines and Thailand.

Cross-cutting traditional cultural-religious cleavages in Indonesia (known as aliran) limit the

potential of populist class-based appeals to poor voters. Indonesian parties are still to some

extent embedded in particular milieus where differences between nominal, secular nationalist,

and religious Muslims (and among the last group between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’

27

Muslim identities) are crucial. While dealiranisasi (the dealignment of these traditional ethno-

religious cleavages) accelerated during in the 2000s (Sherlock 2009), the 2014 elections saw the

resurgence of aliran-based older parties (Fionna and Tomsa, 2017) with Diego Fossati (2016)

arguing this showed that traditional socio-cultural constituencies remain largely in place. Desite

these debates about how strong aliran-based identities remain, when viewed comparatively,

culturalist cleavages that cross-cut class differences in Indonesia remain much more significant

than in the Philippines or Thailand (Ufen 2012). These ethno-religious identities make poor

Indonesians less susceptible to the ‘temptations’ of populist appeals. Although appeals to poor

voters have been made on occasion - such as during Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s successful re-

election bid in 2009 (Mietzner, 2009) – it did not involve the employment of an ‘uncaring

establishment elite’ rhetoric that both Estrada and Thaksin had used to bolster their electoral

support among poor voters.

A former general accused of numerous human rights violations turned strongman

presidential candidate, Prabowo Subianto, challenged Indonesia’s democratic institutions during

the 2014 presidential election campaign. But he was narrowly defeated by a moderate, Joko

Widodo (‘Jokowi’), maintaining democratic stability in the country (Aspinall 2015). Marcus

Mietzner (2014) has argued Indonesia escaped the regional (and worldwide) trend of democratic

reversal because of a stable economy and overall satisfaction with the democratic system despite

the obvious discontent of many voters, with Prabowo’s radicalism repelling moderates and

Jokowi’s status as a political outsider enabling him to win over voters desiring reforms but not

regime change. Despite facing numerous challenges, including within his own adopted political

party, Jokowi was able to overcome recalcitrance in the legislature led by allies of his defeated

rival, showing that in Indonesia, like the Philippines, gridlock is not a common feature of

28

presidentialism. Jokowi was able to consolidate his authority by the middle of 2016, winning

high approval ratings as he focused on economic reforms, particularly infrastructural

development and deregulation (Warburton 2017).

Recently, however, a new threat to Indonesian democracy emerged when radical

Islamists accused the once popular ethnic Chinese and Christian politician Basuki Tjahaja

Purnama (known as Ahok) of blaspheming Islam, undermining Ahok’s election bid to remain

Jakarta governor and leading to his jailing after he was found guilty on these flimsy charges.

Observers again saw the handiwork of Prabowo in the background who allied with the Islamists

(Russell 2017), suggesting ‘the biggest threat to Indonesian democracy – and its conventional

tendency towards moderation – comes from a possible alliance of the Islamist and

ultranationalist populists, which could occur as early as for the 2019 presidential elections’

(Mietzner 2017). Some observers expect the ‘quintessentially mainstream’ Jokowi to again

prevail in the next presidential election as (thus far) positive economic conditions matter more

than appeals to extreme forms of religious identity (Siu 2017). But should a Prabowo or a similar

candidate win Indonesia’s next presidential election with a combination of Islamist and

nationalist appeals, it could indeed lead not a shift to growing illiberalism and even outright

authoritarianism, as the Philippine example suggests.

This does indeed point to a potential danger of a ‘winner take all’ system of presidential

elections which can shift politics in a radically new direction, particularly when legislators are

open to patronage inducements from the chief executive. Yet this is not necessarily a

distinguishing feature of presidentialism. As the case of parliamentary Thailand, a strong headed

leader (Thaksin) exercised imperious leadership according to his critics (who then engineered his

downfall). This example of ‘perilous parliamentarianism’ is why much of the newer research on

29

democratic consolidation has moved away from a focus on the gridlock said to be characteristic

of presidentialism, to an emphasis on the dangers posed by overly powerful and ambitious

elected leaders who attempt use their democratic legitimacy to undermine liberal constraints,

which is as likely to happen under parliamentary rule as under presidentialism (Cheibub 2014).

Conclusion

The Philippine presidential system has gone through several cycles of instability since

independence in 1946 (Hedman, 2006): Marcos’ dictatorial rule for nearly a decade a half until

his overthrow and the restoration of electoral democracy in 1986 which in turn saw two post-

Marcos presidents face repeated coup attempts (Cory Aquino and Arroyo), one removed from

power ‘extra-constitutionally” (Estrada) and the current president as of this writing, Duterte,

ruling in an illiberal fashion. But the fact that Philippine national political leaders have

sometimes been imperious (as dictators or at least highly illiberal rulers) and/or imperilled (due

to attempts to topple them) is not a distinct feature of presidentialism when viewed

comparatively in Southeast Asia. In parliamentary Thailand, Thaksin set up an increasingly

transgressive political regime, undermining horizontal checks to his power. He was overthrown

by a ‘people power putsch’ in 2006 similar to the one which toppled Estrada in 2001 (with

Thaksin’s anointed successors as prime minister removed from power in 2008 and overthrown in

another coup in 2014). On the other, Indonesia’s post-authoritarian system (with one president

removed from office, but following constitutional procedure, while none of the others acting in

an obviously transgressive fashion toward liberal democracy) shows that presidentialism in the

region can be relatively stable.

As an example of ‘pure’ presidentialism because of the strict separation between the

president and congress without any features semi-parliamentarism, the Philippines is an apt case

30

study for ‘first wave’ presidentialism theory which claims presidential rule to be more

destabilizing than parliamentary. Indeed, in the Philippines it appears that competing legitimacy

claims between the president and the legislature contributed to the downfall of Joseph E. Estrada

in 2001. Yet Estrada was effectively removed from office by extra-electoral elite strategic groups

who initiated a civilian uprising against him and supported the military which ultimately forced

him to step down. Without any such gridlock with the legislature (which he controlled through

his overwhelming parliamentary majority), Thailand’s Thaksin faced a similar kind of elite

opposition that led to his downfall in a manner reminiscent of Estrada’s. Presidentialism did not

doom Estrada any more than parliamentarianism did Thaksin – the hostility of, and mobilization

by elite strategic groups did in both of them.

On the other hand, the concept of ‘delegative democracy’ helps elucidate the hegemonic

position of Philippine presidents generally while revealing the political opportunity that existed

for imperious-minded presidents, Marcos and Duterte, to undermine even these weakened checks

and balances. Yet when examined regionally this second peril also finds a striking parallels in

parliamentary Thailand where Thaksin and his surrogates also often acted in a clearly

transgressive fashion toward liberal democracy. The Indonesian case, by contrast, has proved to

be a relatively stable presidential system that has suffered neither from elite-led coups nor

overweening chief executives who undermined horizontal accountability. Despite also having a

relatively ‘pure’ presidential system, Indonesia’s electoral democratic system has been the most

stable in Southeast Asia over the past fifteen years even if potential threats to the system’s

stability have recently emerged. But like in the Philippines, such dangers have little to do with

potential gridlock between the president and the legislature, but rather with the dangers posed by

imperious populist leaders who abuse their already extensive powers under ‘delegative

31

democracy’ to completely undermine liberal norms and the rule of law, which can occur as easily

under parliamentary as presidential rule (Cheibub 2014).

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