240 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition "unfriend" their friends who did not share their political persuasion. Threats to "unfriend" are mechanisms of peer pressure in this new digital era and serve to maintain the group's relative homogeneity in terms of political values and beliefs. In this manner, the peer group can also curate the nature of information one gets exposed to in social media. The peer group may serve as mediators or moderators of the impact of other socialization agents like the family, school and religion. While the peer group can be a source of change, it can also serve as reinforcement for the values, beliefs and behaviors socialized via the family, school and religion. The power of religion as a socializing agent, particularly in terms of moral and ethical values, is on the decline in our secularizing society. That being said, local churches have used the pulpit to try to inuence their followers to vote morally and responsibly (e.g., the Catholic Church's Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting or PPCRV) or, in some cases to support certain candidates and their platforms. The Iglesia ni Kristo, for example, is well known for the degree of inuence they have on their followers come election time. The Catholic Church hierarchy has also attempted to dissuade its followers from supporting candidates who supported policies counter to its system of beliefs (e.g., the Reproductive Health law). The implicit value learned is, once again, authoritarian hierarchical where followers just follow what their leaders ordain since leaders are acknowledged to know what is best for all. Individual critical thinking and non-conformist behavior are hardly encouraged. The role of culture and experience. Socio-political life does not occur in a vacuum. Socialization values are primarily derived from the wellsprings of one's own culture, against the backdrop of one's history, and situated in one's current socio-political realities. The values transmitted by our parents are, in all likelihood, the same values transmitted by their own parents and their parents' parents, and so on through the generations, ensuring the continuation of one's cultural values, beliefs and traditions. Education, using a more direct and straightforward approach, makes the person even more aware of cultural values and their people's history. Education also serves as the government's socialization arm, furthering its agenda for citizen's lives within the nation. But although there are these subtle and not so subtle agents of value/belief transmission, the individual is not a totally passive sponge internalizing all inputs. Individual personal experience can also serve as a conduit for learning new values, beliefs and behavior or for reframing old ways, assuming of course one's ability to self-reect and critically assess the data. In the context of globalization, the free movement of peoples and the plethora of new ideas and experiences, self-socialization needs further scrutiny. Political Socialization in the Philippines, What Next? When this paper was initially conceptualized, the goal was to look into the factors and processes of political socialization in the Philippines in the hope of understanding how we learn to be citizens in our putative democracy. We