8 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy Popular control is a logical objective of political participation and is manifest in the act of citizens freely selecting their authorities, monitoring and assessing their political performance and, ultimately, exacting accountability from them. Mayo (1960: 62-65) makes a distinction between the influence of citizens over policies and their control over policymakers and notes that effective popular control requires the operation of a whole range of political freedoms (e.g. "freedom of speech, assembly, and organization as well as running for public office"). A. 1.1.3 Political Equality and Freedom. Among those classified as a polity's active citizenry, democratic theorizing lays down a principle of political equality. Although, as noted earlier in the discussion of who are properly democracy's "people", there existed differences in the appreciation of who might be the legitimate subjects and ultimate sovereigns of political governance, the belief in the fundamental equality of citizens has been a recurring theme in the literature of democracy from ancient to modern times. A gross idea of equality—the simple count of how many citizens comprise any sector—is actually criticized by Aristotle as the very source of political instability in the Athens of his time (Aristotle/Barker trans. 1962: 204-215). Where the mostly poor—ever the more numerous—demand that equality determined by sheer numbers must also define the distribution of the polity's property, positions and power, the insecurity of the wealthy, the disaffection of the aristocracy and all other sectors that stand to lose political saliency invite political instability. Similarly gross formulations of equality argued selfservingly by the wealthy and the aristocrats have the same effect, he notes. His lead recommendation for a more stable regime (the 'polity' that allows for the interests of the numerous poor, the few who are wealthy and the fewer who are virtuous to be represented and collaboratively served) is a more practicable transformation of the politicized idea of human equality. Modern thinkers of course go much farther in arguing for political equality in governance. Having a far more inclusive sense of "the people" and a more expanded notion of political freedom, they make mandatory the equality of citizens at least in some of the more critical areas of political participation, e.g. suffrage, as evinced by its formalized universality and uniform weight—one person, one vote—and a consequent idea of rule either of the majority or, where applicable, a plurality in political decision-making. At the same time, the protection of the rights and interests of the minority has been enshrined as a fundamental qualifier to majority rule. Together with the idea of political equality, human freedom became an integral part of democratic discourse, expanding and deepening over time.