Rethinking Democratization in the Philippines 185 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 in chapter 3, 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 initiated and 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 confidently assert that we now have a democracy in place. At best, we have comforted ourselves with qualifying our supposedly democratic system as “weak, elitist, flawed, formal, unconsolidated,” and a host of other adjectives. But if this has been the case for more than 50 years now since independence, then as Miranda also asserts, “persistently `dysfunctional' democracies are actually prudently better recognized as non-democracies; analytical sharpness is facilitated and political costs are minimized”. Thus, in no uncertain terms, Miranda's paper stresses the urgent need to re-conceptualize democracy to reflect an imperative of our times: demonstrably significant improvements in human development. As he further explains, this is a “concern that is now demanded of all regime types but most particularly of those alleging to be functionally democratic whatever the extent of 'democracy deficits' might be”. He adds that this reconceptualization of democracy must necessarily go beyond the traditional procedural-electoral concerns of democratic governance and include dimensions of actual improvements in the quality of life indicators of the regime's constituencies. Finally, Miranda points out the need for democracy audits that will incorporate an “inclusive syndrome of civil liberties, and socio-economic-political rights and responsibilities”. Such a democracy audit will be able to distinguish between “pseudo-democracies, democratizing polities and democracies”. The democratization process is necessarily a demanding one because it also involves processes of nation-building and state-building which may require different logics and priorities.1 For instance, in much of the western experience, the process of state-building and nation-building largely preceded the onset of democratization. Thus, in the experience of the European industrialized states, a relatively politically unified state with working national political institutions were already in place when the process of democratization