48 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy elections may be necessary conditions for the existence of a democratic system, there are all kinds of elections and not every electoral exercise qualifies as free, fair and competitive to make possible some degree of accountability.2 Moreover, while elections may be one form by which public officials can be made accountable for their public actions, it is not clear how this mechanism can be effective especially in democratizing polities.3 As explained by O'Donnell: Elections …occur only periodically, and their effectiveness at securing vertical account-ability is unclear, especially given the inchoate party systems, high voter and party volatility, poorly defined issues, and sudden policy reversals that prevail in most new polyarchies (1998:113). The country has one of the longest experiences of electoral politics among developing countries but this history is also steeped in cycles of electoral manipulation involving both fraud and violence. Thus, rather than being “convenient, practicable ways(s) of resolving conflicts without bloodshed and violence” (Przeworski 2003), elections in the country since 1987 have “progressively deteriorated into institutionalized seizures of political power by violence: the violence of money, murder, and deceit” as noted by O.D. Corpuz (1989: vol. 2, 575). There is wide agreement among various authors about the most intractable problems confronting elections and parties in the Philippines: electoral exercises that have been overwhelmingly dominated by powerful political families (Gutierrez et al. 1992; Rivera 2002; Simbulan 2005); poor electoral governance as shown by the organizational ineptitude and lack of institutional autonomy of the Commission on Elections (Calimbahin 2010; CenPEG 2010); and weakly institutionalized, personalistic, and unstable political parties driven mainly by clientelistic rather than programmatic concerns (Montinola 1999; Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2003; Manacsa and Tan 2005; Teehankee 2002; Velasco 2006; Kasuya 2009). From the postwar period to the present, elections in the Philippines have suffered from destabilizing cycles of violence, coercion, and organized manipulation and fraud. Timberman summarizes these fraudulent and violence-driven electoral exercises in the postwar period thus: In the 1946 presidential elections, the supporters of Manuel Roxas threatened an uprising if he lost. After the fraud ridden 1949 presidential elections, in which Jose P. Laurel never conceded defeat to Elpidio Quirino,4 the government had to suppress a minor revolt of Laurel's supporters in his home province of Batangas. In the wake of the fraud committed in 1949 the military was called out to guard the polling in the 1951 congressional elections. In the