82 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition coalition may employ the vast powers of the executive to pursue self-interest masked as the public good (O'Donnell op.cit). Guillermo O'Donnell calls this as “delegative authority”. When these vast powers of the President are combined with the notion of “delegative authority”—the subordination of public good to private gain of the president, his relatives, friends and political allies-- the democratizing polity manifests the characteristics of clientelism, corruption, and patrimonialism. These features of the polity adversely affect its legitimacy and performance and provide an insight about the failure of the president to implement his socioeconomic programs within his or her xed term of ofce. The failures continue into the next administration which institutionally would meet the same fate. Hence, the transition to substantive democracy is stalled. The chronic economic and social problems are not effectively addressed and the transition is unable to progress into a substantive democracy, much less a consolidated democracy. The political development of the Philippines since 1986 can be analyzed from this perspective of a stalled democratic transition. It should be emphasized however, that the transition discussed here is the transition towards substantive democracy from an essentially non-democratic polity. The Philippines is far removed from the consolidated democracy attained by Western polyarchies in spite of the claims of politicians, journalists, and intellectuals that ours is a “democratic country”. The cases of the “Fertilizer Scandal”, NBN-ZTE controversy, the armed forces' questionable budget item on Provisions for Command Directed Activities; the Priority Development Assistance Program (PDAP or Pork Barrel scandal) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program of the Aquino III administration illustrate the corruption resulting from weak horizontal accountability. These cases also illustrate the employment of delegative notion of authority. Figure 1: DIAGRAM OF THE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK Source: Guillermo O'Donnell, “Delegative Democracy” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (eds.) Democracy: A Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) pp. 32-46.