98 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition The largely discouraging policy outcomes and the scandals that wracked the post-EDSA administrations could be seen as the main reason why their public satisfaction ratings declined from the hopeful expectation of the people at the start of their terms of ofce. The trend for the Corazon Aquino, Ramos and Estrada administrations is to begin with a satisfaction rating of about 75 percentage points and decline to around 10 points by the end of their term. The Arroyo administration is the least satisfactory which started with 25 percentage points satisfaction rating and declined to -38 points by December, 2009. It should be noted that the late Philippine Star columnist William Esposo observed that there is double counting of the dissatised responses. He made this observation in connection with the declining net satisfaction of President Aquino III, which surprisingly increased to +41 points in the 3Q of 2015 ( See Net Satisfaction Ratings, Philippines, Presidents, May 1986 to Sep 2015. Available at http://www.SWS). Towards a Stronger Horizontal Accountability through Transparency
The revisions made by the 1986 Constitutional Commission which limited the military powers of the President are very instructive. These revisions suggest that the President should not be dominant relative to Congress and the Supreme Court in what used to be deemed as an exclusive presidential power—proclamation of martial law and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Following this lead, the direction of the agenda for institutional reforms should be to strengthen Congress and the Supreme Court in order to check the vast powers of the president. The powers of the executive should be more effectively checked by the legislature. M. Steven Fish asserts that the strength of the national legislature may be or even the—institutional key to democratization. Stronger legislatures have served as the weightier check on presidents and thus a more reliable guarantor of horizontal accountability than did weaker legislatures (M. Steven Fish in Diamond and Plattner 2009:20). Specically, these agenda for institutional reforms include pushing for legislation that will restore Congress' power of the purse, improve the oversight function of Congress, enable the existing executive-legislative and executivelegislative-judicial collaboration as the main constitutional structure for transparency and control of abuse of authority, and strengthen the scal independence of the judiciary. A signicant initial step is to attempt to democratize public nance in the country by trying to restore Congress' power over the purse. The executive had encroached on this power during the authoritarian regime of Marcos through Presidential Decree 1177—Institutionalizing Budgetary Reforms (Boncodin 2008: Philippine Human Development Report 2008/2009). It provides for the automatic appropriation for the payment of the foreign debts incurred by the government of the Philippines. This automatic appropriation removes from the Congress the power to decide on the matter of payment for the country's foreign debt.