74 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy As shown earlier, our electoral politics continue to be dominated by powerful families typically pursuing narrow and fragmented interests primarily dictated by clan and local district considerations. Under these conditions, there has not emerged any effective national party system that can function to aggregate these extremely diverse, oftentimes conflicting local interests. In the absence of such a party system that can offer coherent, programmatic policy packages around which like-minded politicians and citizens can organize, elections and political parties can hardly be expected to serve as mechanisms of accountability. Not surprisingly therefore, what purport to be political parties have functioned mainly as convenient, temporary alliances by elites to win elections but lacking any internal dynamic for long-term institutionalization. Grossholtz's observation in 1964 that the country's parties are “but coalitions of factions put together largely for electoral purposes and characterized by constantly shifting loyalties to men, not issues” has not lost its relevance for our time (1964: 136). But why have national programmatic parties capable of mediating and aggregating the diverse and conflicting interests of clans and citizens failed to develop? The first explanation lies in the social and historical roots of party formation in the country. In countries that developed strong and stable parties, party formation emerged from deeply embedded societal cleavages (class, religious, rural vs. urban, worker vs. capitalist) and parties institutionalize themselves precisely to “represent” and advance such interests (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). An alternative reading argues that parties, in fact, deliberately shape and provide identities to such cleavages and it is this systematic party intervention that makes such cleavages politically salient (Sartori 1969). In both readings of the origins of stable party formation, however, there exists an organic linkage between the party and specific social constituencies and both are locked into a mutually reinforcing system of loyalties and obligations leading to institutionalization. In the more stable democratic systems, in fact, the contending parties have succeeded in channeling deep cleavages “into open and organized class conflict” through the electoral system (Heller 2000). The Philippines, of course, suffers from deep cleavages especially along class and identity issues as witness the continuing armed and contentious struggles waged to articulate such concerns. However, the first political parties formed under American colonial rule derived their legitimacy precisely by coopting the local elites away from the revolutionary struggle that in various ways sought to address these cleavages. Thus, the Partido Federal and later the Nacionalista party ended up essentially as parties of the local municipal and provincial elite families sustained by their American patrons and with no accountability to well defined social constituencies.28