188 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy One obvious effect of this overwhelming clan dominance over our governance system has been a highly elitist and narrow pool of leadership recruitment, disabling potentially more progressive and transformative leaders from winning elective positions. Furthermore, continuing clan dominance has severely weakened public accountability mechanisms especially in the context of other institutional infirmities such as the weakness of “horizontal accountability” mechanisms (discussed by Ronas), the limitations of civil society organizations and the process of decentralization (explained by Holmes) and the absence of well-institutionalized political parties. Adding to the anemic process of democratization in the country has been the absence of well-institutionalized parties that could effectively link peoples' interests with leaders who are sensitive and responsive to social concerns in a virtuous cycle of interest aggregation and accountability. In my chapter, I explain that the particular institutional attributes of our presidential system such as the far greater powers of the executive vis-à-vis the legislature and the judiciary, the term limits on the presidency, and the independent resource base of many of the dominant political clans, have not been conducive to the emergence of well-institutionalized parties. I further argue that effective party building can be enhanced by two processes. First, mass-based parties espousing alternative programs of government must be allowed the full freedom to challenge the existing parties in open and institutionalized forms of conflict. In pursuit of common causes, these alternative parties may also explore principled political alliances with established parties. Second, some institutional changes could be explored to strengthen the party list system. Some of these concrete measures include increasing its seat allocation in Congress and shifting to full proportional representation (PR) in its election system by doing away with the three-seat cap on individual parties. However, I also argue that a minimum vote threshold (2-3 percent of total votes cast for the PL) should be retained to preclude the further fragmentation of the Party List (PL) system. Thus, for the PL system, the challenge focuses on the combination of more inclusive forms of representation particularly of the marginalized and under-represented sectors while avoiding the political paralysis of extreme party fragmentation. In democratic systems, two aspects of public accountability are usually studied: “vertical” and “horizontal” accountability although as stressed in this book, a third aspect, sometimes referred to as social or “oblique” accountability involves the impact of civil society organizations on the same process. In his examination of “horizontal accountability issues” among the key national agencies of government, Ronas builds on Guillermo O'Donnell's concept of “delegative democracy” as a unifying thread to examine why executive