184 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy political conditions of the people. In sum, Miranda points out that “a dimension of regime performance is what separates formal or paper democracies from those that demonstrably protect and promote the welfare of the people.” Second, consistent with this critique of a mainly procedural definition of democracy, our understanding of the public accountability of authorities and rulers in a democratic system is not limited to citizen participation in electoral exercises but must include citizen participation through their active political civil society organizations. By adding this dimension, the concept of public accountability of the officials in a democratic system is thus substantially expanded to include the intervention and participation of civil society groups in the political process. This new dimension of accountability in fact gains saliency in political systems like the Philippines where electoral exercises have been traditionally dominated by powerful political families and routinely subverted by violence, coercion and systematic manipulation of electoral results. However, it needs to be pointed out that citizen participation in civil society groups does not have a uniformly virtuous impact on the public accountability process since such groups themselves have different and oftentimes conflicting agenda and political preferences. Since Philippine political life has been significantly energized by politically active civil society groups, we need to understand better whether such activities have indeed facilitated the democratic transition process or have introduced debilitating cycles of instabilities in society. Another important conceptual guidepost emphasized by our study lies in the crucial distinction between democracy and democratization. As argued by Miranda, a democracy is best understood as one that has succeeded in showing overall improvement in the following core features of democratic systems over a reasonable period of time (from twenty five to fifty years): “popular sovereignty and representative governance; political participation and popular control; political equality and freedom; rule of law; public accountability; and, most crucially, the human quality of life for its citizens”. Reviewing the country's dismal governance history and its consistently dysfunctional operation and poor outcomes on a wide variety of socio-economic and political indicators, Miranda concludes that the Philippines is better described as a “nondemocracy and, probably, a non-democratic oligarchy”. Indeed, a “nondemocratic oligarchy” aptly sums up the key features of the Philippine political regime. Its oligarchic social structure has severely limited access to power to a few dominant political families while the means of accessing power has been largely undemocratic in the absence of genuinely free and fair elections, the minimum requirement for any democratic regime.