56 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition accountability to well dened social constituencies.19 Reecting the deep seated class cleavages of the colonial order, new political parties rmly built on these concerns emerged later. Thus, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Sakdal Party were deliberately founded to represent the interests of specic constituencies made up primarily of the peasantry and the workers. In fact, these parties participated in various election contests and the peasant-worker base of the Socialist and Communist Party provided the main electoral constituency of the Democratic Alliance that participated in the 1946 national elections.20 However, the vicissitudes of the Second World War and the Cold War, the perception of elite domination of the electoral contests, and the systematic persecution and harassment of the leaders and supporters of these parties pushed them to abandon the parliamentary struggle. The main lesson here is that the origins and social bases of a political party matter in determining its degree of institutionalization and responsiveness to a programmatic platform. Parties consciously built to represent the interests of specic social constituencies, particularly to address deep-seated cleavages and conict are more likely to be institutionalized and stable because of the cycle of representation and accountability built into the relationship between the leaders and their followers. In fact, the strongest impetus for reforming the country's party system will most likely come from the pressures exerted by well-disciplined mass-based parties, a process that is now unfolding in our electoral system, partly through the Party List system, notwithstanding its many institutional inrmities.21 Toward this end, the challenge is to construct a political and electoral system that allows for “open and organized conict” such that even parties articulating alternative ideologies are fully encouraged to participate in elections and parliamentary struggles.22 The second factor that determines the nature of the party system lies in the set of institutions and electoral rules that enable or constrain the way the parties operate. What has been the impact of some of the institutions and rules under our presidential system, especially those that have been adopted since 1987? By its nature, a presidential system, in contrast with a parliamentary system, is a “divided government” with the presidency and Congress enjoying “dual legitimacies” through elections. As pointed out by the political comparativist Juan Linz, presidentialism may also “generate its own distinctive anti-party sentiment” since parties in this system are less likely to articulate government programs and broad public policies ---functions which are more likely to be performed by presidents” (2002: 292). Moreover, as further stressed by Linz, presidential elections also “tend to weaken the standing of parties since the president is not elected as a leader of a party and might even be outsiders with no links to parties” (2002: 292). In the Philippine presidential system, the nationwide electoral mandate enjoyed by the Senate further complicates the problems of representation and governmental efciency.