Philippine Democratization: Summing-up Key Conceptual, Institutional, and Developmental Issues 247 (Schmitter and Karl 1991; O'Donnell 1998). The rst level or vertical accountability is represented by free and credible electoral exercises which enable citizens to choose their ofcials. The second level or horizontal accountability refers to the system of institutional checks and balances between and among the major agencies of government in the executive, legislative and judicial branches, including other constitutional bodies. In our book's expanded notion of accountability, we include the involvement of the citizenry in “politically active civil society groups” and how such actions impact on both the vertical and horizontal levels of accountability (Miranda 2011: 2). The second critical feature added to our redenition of democracy is a regime performance outcome that tracks the capacity of a democratic system to ensure the improvement in the “human quality of life for its citizens within fty years of a regime's formal democratic initiation” (Miranda 2011: 2). This insistence on a substantive regime performance indicator for a democratic system is completely lacking in a procedurally oriented notion of democracy. It is imperative to include a regime performance dimension in dening democratic systems since a process of democratization can hardly be sustained in the absence of signicant improvements in the material welfare and sociopolitical conditions of the people. Comparative research ndings on democratic regimes have consistently shown that strong economic conditions are “by far the best predictor of the survival of democracies” (Przeworski et al. 2000:137) and those with high levels of inequality have lower prospects of sustaining democratization (Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). Indeed, these are sobering ndings for the democratization process in our own context where poverty incidence continues to be high at about 25 percent (self-rated poverty is much higher, typically in the 40-45 percent range). Elections and Vertical Accountability Among students of democracy there is general agreement that the existence of “free, fair, competitive, and credible elections” is the minimum procedural requirement that qualies a political system as democratic. Achieving a minimum standard of fairness and competitiveness in electoral exercises, however, has not been sufciently achieved by many political systems deemed to be democratic. Reecting the difculty of this goal, many so-called democratic systems have in reality been qualied by all kinds of adjectives such as “elitist, awed, weak, patrimonial, clientelist, oligarchic, etc.” democracies. In the literature this is what is referred to as classic cases of the “conceptual stretching” of the concept of democracy instead of simply acknowledging these systems as non-democratic. The Philippines has one of the longest experiences of electoral politics among developing countries but this history is also steeped in cycles of electoral manipulation involving both fraud and violence. Thus, rather than being “convenient, practicable ways(s) of resolving conicts without bloodshed and violence” (Przeworski 2003), elections in the country have