182 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion: Rethinking Democratization in the Philippines Temario C. Rivera Is the Philippines a democracy? The four authors in this volume provide an alternative reading of the Philippine experience by going against the grain on much of what has been written about the Philippines as a supposedly “democratic” or “democratizing” society. At one level, this reconceptualization of a key concept such as democracy as it applies to our concrete experience is liberating since it opens up a new way of framing a problem by seeking greater conceptual clarity and political relevance. At another level, the re-evaluation that we have engaged in forces us to consider alternative responses to a problem whose roots have remained hidden or misunderstood under the conventional approaches. Setting the overall tone of this study, Miranda in chapter one provides a rigorous re-examination of the concept of democracy and its measurement and concludes that by no means can the Philippines be considered a democracy. In his review of the vast and contested literature on the concept of democracy, Miranda adopts a well-established definition by Schmitter and Karl (2009:4) but adds two essential components: 1) a system of making authorities publicly accountable through the involvement of citizens not only in electoral processes but also through “politically active civil society groups”; and 2) a criterion for regime performance in which a democratic system must show a capability for achieving a “progressively human quality of life for its citizens within fifty years of a regime's formal democratic initiation”.