48 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition traditionally dominated by powerful political families and routinely subverted by violence, coercion and systematic manipulation of electoral results. However, it needs to be pointed out that citizen participation in civil society groups does not have a uniformly virtuous impact on the public accountability process since such groups themselves have different and oftentimes conicting agenda and political preferences. Since Philippine political life has been signicantly energized by politically active civil society groups, we need to understand better whether such activities have indeed facilitated the democratic transition process or have introduced debilitating cycles of instabilities in society. Another important conceptual guidepost emphasized by our study lies in the crucial distinction between democracy and democratization. As argued by Miranda, a democracy is best understood as one that has succeeded in showing overall improvement in the following core features of democratic systems over a reasonable period of time (from twenty ve to fty years): “popular sovereignty and representative governance; political participation and popular control; political equality and freedom; rule of law; public accountability; and, most crucially, the human quality of life for its citizens” (2011). Reviewing the country's dismal governance history and its consistently dysfunctional operation and poor outcomes on a wide variety of socio-economic and political indicators, Miranda concludes that the Philippines is better described as a “nondemocracy and, probably, a non-democratic oligarchy” (2011:23). Indeed, a “non-democratic oligarchy” aptly sums up the key features of the Philippine political regime. Its oligarchic social structure has severely limited access to power to a few dominant political families while the means of accessing power has been largely undemocratic in the absence of genuinely free and fair elections, the minimum requirement for any democratic regime. One may offer a less stringent criterion for judging the Philippine experience and argue that if the Philippines is not (yet) a democracy it is at least democratizing and on the way to being a functional democracy. But the process of democratization does not automatically translate to a democracy and could be reversed or stalled and in the words of Ronas (2011) end up as a grotesque case of a “never-ending democratization” process. As also shown by the Philippine experience, this democratization process is particularly disabling and dangerous when controlled by powerful oligarchic blocs. It is therefore crucial to understand why the protracted and contested process of democratization in the country has not reached a stage where we can condently assert that we now have a democracy in place. At best, we have comforted ourselves with qualifying our supposedly democratic system as “weak, elitist, awed, formal, unconsolidated,” and a host of other adjectives. The democratization process is necessarily a demanding one because it also involves processes of nation-building and state-building that may require different logics and priorities.5 For instance, in much of the western experience,