Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 25 past national elections. Most elections to date had been attended by funding and campaign practices mocking existing laws, by extensive cheating and by much violence. "Guns, goons and gold" is a popular refrain describing what people associate with elections by way of critical resources, with the Commission on Elections (COMELEC)—the national agency tasked by law with overseeing Philippine elections— often being added as a crucial fourth element to the corrupting trinity. Honest, orderly, peaceful, lawful and credible elections has not been the rule in the Philippines. Of the four most recent elections, one (that of 2001 installing Estrada as president) is perceived to be generally credible but the two others (2004 and 2007) consolidating Arroyo's political preeminence have spurred a fractious crisis of presidential legitimacy. The latest in 2010 where automated elections resulted in a record quick count of votes, was initially publicly well-received but later made for much suspicion in the possible tampering and manipulation of the automation process, from the programming of its source code to the actual machine count and the verification of the final electoral results. The democratic concern with effective political participation and credible political contestation has not been served well by too many significantly flawed national and local elections. Beyond the conduct of elections themselves, critical elements of the electoral process are similarly critically flawed. Political parties are one such element. In the Philippines, political parties usually are trans-ideological, personality mechanisms used by leading politicians to secure electoral victory. Lacking programs of governance that are ideologically distinguishable from those of other parties and unable to exact organizational discipline from its transaction ally-oriented, pragmatic members, political parties in the Philippines are a poor copy of those found in other polities. Practically speaking, they do not exist as attested to by the ease with which they could be abandoned, reconfigured or captured by resourceful politicians. At the highest levels, party members and leading functionaries can and do switch loyalties without incurring significant political costs. Party switching that robs a political party of much of its structural integrity is a normal phenomenon in Philippine politics. It can be highly productive for quick-thinking, strategically-minded political candidates. A quick check will reveal that the majority of elected Philippine presidents have practiced political turncoats with unarguably good results, often at the very moment they make their run for the presidency. As for the social democratic—some would say economist and general human development—concerns of democracies in Heywood's list, one does not have to trot out the numerous statistical studies showing the enduring