32 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Confounding Political Regimes: The Wherefores of a Persistent Illusion One is nally back to the intriguing question of why many social scientists, many political scientists among them, continue to mistake the nature of the Philippine polity and misjudge it as being a democracy. Several reasons might be offered to explain this interesting phenomenon. Some are easily disposed of as probably in error but some are quite provocative and link up with observations made by academics of their professional colleagues' substantive orientations Ÿ Insufcient familiarity with the history and actual operations of a country's politics may not be the primary reason for this recurring regime misappreciation. If subject-familiarity were the culprit, then the error would not be as prevalent among native academics as among foreign scholars, especially some of the latter who – often as parachuting experts – only occasionally and consequently less reliably read the regime as democratic. Ÿ Professional incompetence must be ruled out as even eminent academics with a well-deserved reputation for competent, scholarly work share the view that the Philippines is indeed a democracy; an error of judgment that even in academe should not be automatically construed as the full equivalent of professional incompetence. It is probably not professional incompetence that inclines many of the country's political scientists to desist from publicly acknowledging the oligarchic character of their nation's political regime. They are far too intelligent not to appreciate the historical evidence properly. Whether this evidence is processed sociologically, economically and possibly even psychologically, the more probable conclusion would be that oligarchy rather than democracy has been characteristic of this country's governance across the decades. The current state of affairs and the previous national administrations' record of oft-demonstrated impunity, even as they may push academic analysts faster and more strongly towards a conclusion of oligarchic rule, are actually no more than an extension of a long political tradition that misrepresents the prohuman and therefore essentially compassionate nature of democracy. It is this natural tendency towards kindliness that probably motivates many academics in this country to cloak the brutality of oligarchic rule and pass it off as democratizing albeit feckless governance. If the political reality is far too unsettling, the proffered strategy is to publicly minimize it and then quietly assist in efforts to change it. This alternative becomes even more attractive should the short-term appear to preclude pragmatic possibilities of regime modication or outright progressive change. Many academics, driven by wistfulness and an intense longing for democratic governance can actually liberally respond to oligarchic politics by extending to its practitioners a most liberal benet of the