In Search of Credible Elections and Parties: The Philippine Paradox 47 explains the extraordinary resilience of these social forces in our political life. Thirdly, the paper investigates the impact on the electoral process and party formation of the key institutional reforms introduced after 1986, particularly the impact of presidential powers, the Party List system and term limits. Finally, consistent with this book's conceptualization and measurement of democracy as a system of governance where rulers are held publicly accountable for their actions by citizens (Schmitter and Karl 1991), this paper evaluates the nature of the accountability process as shown in electoral exercises and results.1 Flawed Elections and Democratization Most academic and journalistic accounts of the electoral and party system in the Philippines describe it as democratic. At times, the same system is conceded to be democratic but qualified as “elitist, weak, flawed, patrimonial, clientelist, unconsolidated, oligarchic, and a host of many other adjectives. This assumes that the country's political system, for all its weaknesses , at least continues to experience reasonably free, fair and competitive elections which are usually accepted as the minimum condition for qualifying a system of rule as a democracy. Relating the country's electoral exercises and its party system with the broader historical, political, and institutional context, this study finds this claim largely unsupported by the historical evidence. There are serious grounds to question the claim that elections in the country have been largely free, fair and competitive and that these practices including its party system can serve as accountability mechanisms in the relations between citizens, representatives and rulers. Major accounts of the functioning of democratic, representative political systems include at least two main features: a system of free, fair and competitive elections to choose governing officials and a system by which rulers are held accountable for their public actions by citizens. In an often quoted definition of democracy, Schmitter and Karl put it this way: Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives. (1991:76) Elections are the most visible public mechanism for choosing representatives in a democratic system. However, Schmitter and Karl also rightly alert us to the “fallacy of electoralism” in which elections are considered as a sufficient condition for the existence of democracy (1991: 78). Indeed, while