Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 23 elections; from the late nineteen-forties to the latest elections of the new millennium, most elections had been attended by funding and campaign practices mocking existing laws, by extensive cheating and by much violence. "Guns, goons and gold" is a popular refrain describing what people associate with elections by way of critical resources, with the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) – the national agency tasked by law with overseeing Philippine elections – often being added as a crucial fourth element to the corrupting trinity. Honest, orderly, peaceful, lawful and credible elections had not been the rule in the Philippines. Of the ve most recent elections, one (that of 2001 installing Estrada as president) is perceived to be generally credible but the two others (2004 and 2007) consolidating Arroyo's political preeminence have spurred a fractious crisis of presidential legitimacy. The latest in 2010 and 2016 where automated elections resulted in a record quick count of votes, was initially publicly well-received but later made for much suspicion in the possible tampering and manipulation of the automation process, from the programming of its source code to the actual machine count and the verication of the nal electoral results (Azurin, 2013; also see the present volume's chapters where Azurin and Rivera separately discuss the recent elections). 2016) The democratic concern with effective political participation and credible political contestation has not been served well by too many signicantly awed national and local elections. Beyond the conduct of elections themselves, critical elements of the electoral process are similarly critically awed. Political parties are one such element. In the Philippines, political parties usually are trans-ideological, personality mechanisms used by leading politicians to secure electoral victory. Lacking programs of governance that are ideologically distinguishable from those of other parties and unable to exact organizational discipline from its transaction ally-oriented, pragmatic members, political parties in the Philippines are a poor copy of those found in other polities. Practically speaking, they do not exist as attested to by the ease with which they could be abandoned, recongured or captured by resourceful politicians. At the highest levels, party members and leading functionaries could and do switch loyalties without incurring signicant political costs. Party switching that robs a political party of much of its structural integrity is a normal phenomenon in Philippine politics. It can be highly productive for quick-thinking, strategically-minded political candidates. A quick check will reveal that the majority of elected Philippine presidents have practiced political turncoatism with unarguably good results, often at the very moment they make their run for the presidency. As for the social democratic – some would say economic and general human development -- concerns of democracies in Heywood's list; one does not have to trot out the numerous statistical studies showing the enduring decits of Philippine governance across the years. All Human Development Reports (HDR), whether it be the global study annually published by the United