Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 27 In 2009, after observing that conditions have not remarkably improved and that attempted reforms appear to mostly fail to transform, the PHDR's phrasing of the institutional problems confronting the country and its reformers markedly changes. Without lapsing into the activist language of ideological speechmakers, the PHDR, in reacting to the country's deteriorated position between 1997 and 2007 as charted by the World Governance Indicators on a range of governance concerns (rule of law, regulatory quality, control of corruption, government effectiveness and voice and accountability), pointedly remarks: The drop in the Philippines' ranking in the WGI between 1996 and 2007 is alarming though not surprising. The country has long been described as a 'soft state,' where rules and enforcement are for sale [Fabella, 2008]. There is wide agreement that the weakness of political institutions in the Philippines is a major, if not the major, hindrance to its further progress (HDN 2009: 2). [Bold type that of the Report] A similar sense of frustration and even cynicism regarding the wardens of political governance is detectible in many parts of the 2009 PHDR. Speaking of key institutions administering the national bureaucracy, exacting political accountability from public officials and overseeing the nation's judicial system, the Report is unable to rule out the political intrusions that would weaken and disable the functional objectives of these critical institutions . And there lies the rub. For in all three organizations which concern us—the Civil Service Commission, the Office of the Ombudsman, and the Supreme Court—performance has been affected in varying degrees, and is anticipated to be further affected, by the direct or indirect interference from, or circumvention of rules by, the appointing authority (PHDR 2009: 43). Indeed there lies the rub, when economists traditionally known for conservative writing, dramatically start their assessment of national human development in the Philippines with the poetry of the oppressed from another age, when despotism, oligarchy and national plunder made the poet Francisco Baltazar protest more than a hundred years earlier: Sa loob at labas ng bayan kong sawi, kaliluha'y siyang nangyayaring hari, kagalinga't bait ay nalulugami, ininis sa hukay ng dusa't pighati (PHDR 2009: 1). [In and around my unfortunate nation, Deceit and treason reign, Virtue and reason are shamed, Suffocated in the grave of sorrow and pain.]