Where Do Regimes Come From? Where Do They Go? The Philippines Between Neopatrimonialism and Oligarchy

Abstract

Despite decades of experience with democratic institutions since the end of World War II, the quality of Philippine democratic development has been limited, at best. Even the successful civil societal mobilization against Ferdinand Marcos neopatrimonial regime did not generate a political framework in which an effective state apparatus is capable of backing democratic values associated with the formal institutional setting. Why is that the case? This paper attempts to answer this question by tracing the regime origins and dynamics of the Philippines since the late days of Spanish colonialism. It is argued that what ultimately determines institutional changes of contemporary regimes is not so much the age of democratization they currently live in, but the historically-grown conflict structures that constitute patterns of legimization and delegitimization.