34 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy 8. Enduring armed struggle against the government by secessionist and leftist groups indicates that political legitimacy is a serious concern of all the national administrations in the past fifty years. 9. A politicized military has four times defined the ability or inability of a national administration to survive. This central political role of the military in the outcomes of civilian rule is not easily reconciled with the primarily civilian character of democratic governance. C.2 Confounding Political Regimes: The Wherefores of a Persistent Illusion One is finally back to the intriguing question of why many social scientists, among them many prominent political scientists, continue to mistake the nature of the Philippine polity and misjudge it as being a democracy? Several reasons might be offered to explain this interesting phenomenon. Some are easily disposed of as probably in error but some are quite provocative and link up with observations made by academics of their professional colleagues' substantive orientations. Ÿ Insufficient familiarity with the history and actual operations of a country's politics may not be the primary reason for this recurring regime misappreciation. If subject-familiarity were the culprit, then the error would not be as prevalent among native academics as among foreign scholars, especially some of the latter who—often as parachuting experts—only occasionally and consequently less reliably read the regime as democratic. Ÿ Professional incompetence must be ruled out as even eminent academics with a well-deserved reputation for competent, scholarly work share the view that the Philippines is indeed a democracy; an error of judgment that even in academe should not be automatically construed as the full equivalent of professional incompetence. It is probably not professional incompetence that inclines many of the country's political scientists to desist from publicly acknowledging the oligarchic character of their nation's political regime. They are far too intelligent not to appreciate the historical evidence properly. Whether this evidence is processed sociologically, economically and possibly even psychologically, the more probable conclusion would be that oligarchy rather than democracy has been characteristic of this country's governance across the decades. The current state of affairs and the previous national administration's record of impunity, even as they may push academic analysts faster and more strongly towards a conclusion of oligarchic rule, is actually no more than an extension of a