The Curious Cases of Philippine Civil Society and Decentralization 153 society groups. Shaping civil society's muscle is easier said than done but it requires going back to and not relenting on basic strategies that have served many of these groups well in the past—organizing and popular education. The limited mass base of civil society has made it reliant on two things to influence state action or generate active support from a generally unorganized population. The first is the horizontal linkage among civil society groups (both domestic and global) while the second is its linkage with stakeholders from other spheres (e.g., political parties, business groups, international donor agencies) who share their interest or stance on specific issues. Intra-civil society linkages As regards the horizontal linkage, as discussed earlier, formations, coalitions and networks among civil society groups have proven to be effective in generating a consensus among diverse groups, in pushing for the enactment of a law, in monitoring government action, or in deterring the state or a key political leader, from pursuing an act that is blatantly “undemocratic.” The last, two massive protests—the first in 1997 and the second in 2001—pushed two different Chief Executives to relent, one in his attempt to change the charter to lift term limits, the other to vacate the Palace and find himself as having “constructively resigned”, his Vice President thrust into his position by an urban uprising, the machinations of powerful forces behind the scene, and jurisprudence from the highest court. In both protests, civil society came in almost full force and sustained the common front chiefly because the campaign did not get protracted. It is in long-haul battles that horizontal linkages falter, as it was in the case of the Congress for People's Agrarian Reform (CPAR). Faced with stiff opposition from a landed elite packed Congress, CPAR, despite the noble efforts of some of its members, eventually dissolved given due to differences in perspectives as to which track—state-directed or mass-movement based—must be taken. (Wui and Lopez 1997) In her own examination of Philippine civil society, Franco (Alagappa 2004) saw other sources of horizontal division as she states that: One fault line is between those who subscribe to the dominant elite view of the meaning and purpose of democracy and those who hold a more popular view…Among those subscribing to a popular view in more recent decades, however, disagreement over how to get there, influenced in part by the difficult institutional obstacles associated with elite democracy, has created two broadly distinct currents concerned with system transformation…One