Students enrolled in Political Theory 101 are taught the system of government of this country is representative government. Since it is unfeasible, for numerical reasons, for the citizens of a democratic country to enact laws and make national policies themselves, they entrust those functions, under the terms of the Constitution, to representatives whom they choose at periodic elections. At the end of the electoral process the voting-age population of a democratic society is divided into two groups, namely, the voters, who in the law on contracts are called the principals, and the elected representatives, who are the agents of the principals.
In a democratic society an election may be considered as an agency-contract signing with the electorate and the candidates, with the candidates agreeing to represent the voters in the legislature. It goes without saying that every voter will cast his or her ballot for the candidate or candidates whose positions on issues – national as well as local – are reflective of his own positions. Thus, if he or she believes that the present form of government in this country is a dead-end and that federalism is the way to a better future, he or she would vote for the candidate whose platform includes federalism. Again, if a voter believes that the drug problem needs a suspend-due-process approach, he or she should vote for a candidate who advocates such an approach. Or if a voter believes that the answer to the nation’s fiscal difficulties is a sharp decrease in income taxation, he or she will shade the box opposite the candidate who believes in such an approach to taxation.
Political parties and party-list groups have names – in commercial parlance, those would be their brands – and they go into electoral combat with platforms consisting of their positions on the principal national issues of the day. The winning candidates are proclaimed by the Commission on Elections as the elected representatives of the political parties or party-list groups indicated in their COCs (certificates of candidacy). Thus, in the 2016 elections the winning candidates were proclaimed as representatives of one of the major political parties (Liberal Party, Gobyernong May Puso Party, United Nationalist Alliance, PDP Laban and Lakas-NUCD) as one of the myriad of party-list groups.
It goes without saying, also, that the electorate expects the candidates for whom they voted to retain their COC-indicated party affiliations for the duration of the Executive or legislative terms to which they were elected. In other words, Liberal voters expect their elected representatives to run for re-election six or three years hence, and NPC, UNA, G-P, PDP-Laban and Lakas-NUCD voters doubtless expect their elected representatives to do the same. After all, the voters cast their ballots for them not because of their good looks or their pleasant personalities.
Imagine, then, the shock of most Filipino voters when they woke up after Election Day 2016 to find that the men and women elected by them as Liberal or UNA had immediately turned around and joined the “supermajority” cobbled together by incoming Speaker-designate Pantaleon Alvarez, a close ally of President Duterte. What happened, they asked themselves, to the men and women who sought and accepted the voters in order to represent the Liberal Party, UNA, NPC and other parties in the 17th Congress? How did 34 million votes cast in support of the platforms of the Liberal Party and other major parties wind up being supportive of Rodrigo Duterte’s administration?
The explanation is simple: the candidates voted into Congress – especially into the House of Representatives – by the Filipino people apparently do not believe that they have a commitment to remain attached to, and to steadfastly support, the party under whose standard they ran. They apparently believe that once elected, they are free agents – individuals free to chart their courses in Congress with absolutely no obligation or duty to seek any people’s concurrence or to adhere to any agreed platform or program. In effect, they think they can behave like political-party or party-list candidates up to Proclamation Day and like independents thereafter.
Considering that Filipino voters usually vote for political party’s candidates for President and district Representatives, one would have expected Rodrigo Duterte’s 38-percent-of-total-votes showing to translate into at most one-third of the 289 members of the House of Representatives. But as events have shown, that expectation was greatly exceeded. One-third became almost 100 percent of the Lower House. All because of massive turncoatism on the part of newly elected members of that chamber. The spectacle of almost all of the members of the Liberal Party-led Lower House coalition of the Aquino administration rushing to take their oaths before new Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez has been nothing short of disgusting. The scale and speed of the coat-turning have been breathtaking.
What the Filipino people have just witnessed in the House of Representatives is a grave perversion of the system of representative government that is supposed to prevail in this country. The men and women who were placed in the legislature by their principals – the voters – now act like they no longer are representatives; instead, they now behave like independents.
This, of course, is not the first time the Filipino people have witnessed this spectacle; they have witnessed it before. Nor will it be the last time. Each time it happens, each time the likes of recent Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. rush to the new center of power once that is established, the essence of Philippine democracy undergoes an erosion.
