32 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy Figure 3. Poverty Self-Rating (March 2001 to May 2011/Philippines) A pragmatic lesson could be learned from this monitoring of the public pulse. If the delineation of a political system must be appreciated beyond its formal attributes, i.e. if the truly defining character of a polity were understood to be its effective, substantive operations over time, then one's view of a "really existing democracy," or an "effective democracy" would have to echo that of Sen's as he approvingly cites former Filipino president, Fidel V. Ramos. Stressing demonstrated performance over the formal dimension of political governance, the latter had pointedly observed: "The political challenge for people around the world today is not just to replace authoritarian regimes by democratic ones. Beyond this, it is to make democracy work for ordinary people (Sen 1999: 158)." Clearly, by this uncompromisingly operationalizing standard, Philippine governance across the years can no longer be viewed as a working democratic proposition. After decades of development-bonsaing if not outrightly development-aborting political and economic underperformance, why must analytically-minded probers, including those who carry professional credentials as governance experts, fail to see that a consistently non-working "democracy" might really be something else, perhaps a successful nondemocratic regime, one that is even probably a functional, non-democratic oligarchy? Some of the world's leading democracy researchers have expressed similarly skeptical thoughts and raised timely caveats in assessing current democracy and democratization claims (O'Donnell 2010: 30; Schmitter 2010: 19).