The Never Ending Democratization of the Philippines
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Source: Guillermo O'Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies”, 1998.
Key Concepts
The concepts employed in the above thesis need to be dened. The most
basic concepts of this study are “democracy”, “democratization” and
“consolidated democracy”. There are two schools in comparative politics about
the notion of democracy: the “procedural” and “substantive” notions. The
procedural notion which is the dominant view emphasizes the electoral system
as the essential feature of democracy. This is the view of Joseph Schumpeter
(1954: 269-83) and Samuel Huntington (1991: 5-13). This view is claimed to be
the minimalist denition which avoids the fuzziness of the concept and had
thus won a wide acceptance by the 1970s (Huntington Ibid.).
The substantive notion of democracy expands the procedural notion that is
mainly focused on the electoral system. The substantive notion argues to
include the outcomes of the democratic procedure and the broader social values
associated with democracy (Whitehead 2002: 12) Democracy in this sense is
seen as both a means and an end. It is not only a description of a political system
but also a statement of its values. Democracy is not merely about the method of
choosing the leaders, but should also yield policies or outcomes that would
“expand freedoms” (Sen 1999: 35-53). In the view of Amartya Sen it should be
able to address the social and economic problems of poverty, ignorance and
disease. These outcomes are closely linked to what was referred to as the factor
of legitimacy and performance (Abueva in Miranda 1997: 44). The conception of
democracy as a political method would be empty if it is not linked to outcomes
that advance human development (Munck 2009: 126-27).Beyond its procedural
characteristics, democracy is “ultimately about individual dignity and
collective decency” (Reynolds in Diamond and Plattner 2009: 224).
In this context, the denition of “modern democracy” by Professor Felipe B.
Miranda, because it conjoins the procedural and substantive notions of
democracy, is taken by this study as the appropriate meaning of democracy. He
denes it as follows:
Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which the
authorities or rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public
realm by citizens acting mostly indirectly through (1) the competition
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