The Never Ending Democratization of the Philippines 85 associational life; there must be a state bureaucracy that is usable by the new democratic government, and there must be an institutionalized economic society” (Linz and Stefan Ibid.: 7). The absence or weakness of accountability among delegative democracies is primarily due to the stronger power of the President relative to the powers of the legislature and the judiciary (Jurgen Puhle 2005: 12). The powerful President could erode the capability of the legislature and the judiciary to control the president and punish him or her in case of abuse of power. Answerability is the common understanding of accountability (Arugay 2005: 64-65, see also Philippine Human Development Report 2008/2009.) However, the executive also needs to be transparent, another aspect of accountability, to enable the legislature and the judiciary to make the executive answerable and controllable. As Philippe C. Schmitter says, “Horizontal accountability is a matter of interaction, not between rulers and ruled, but between the arms and branches of the regime and state acting according to preset constitutional or legal rules” (Schmitter 2004: 53). Outside the executive-legislative-judicial nexus, horizontal accountability is also served through the constitutional bodies, e.g., Commission on Audit, the Ombudsman, Commission on Human Rights and Civil Service Commission (Schmitter Ibid.: 53). The inability of these bodies to control or make the executive answerable for abusing his powers is what the weakness of “horizontal accountability” means. In case of an “executive coup”, the President assumes unlimited power for life, which makes him unaccountable to the electorate regarding his term ofce and program of government. This is what the absence or weakness of “vertical accountability” means. Effective horizontal accountability is not the product of isolated agencies but of a network of agencies (up to and including high courts) committed to upholding the rule of law (O'Donnell 1998: 119). It may even involve civil society if we accept the possibility of Schmitter's “oblique accountability”. As earlier noted, accountability is often associated with answerability for violations of law. In this study, the transparency and controllability aspects of accountability are emphasized rather than its answerability aspect. These are what could be considered the preventive rather than the punitive elements of accountability. In a presidential system where horizontal accountability is weak, the executive is uncontrollable and unanswerable. When the vast powers of his ofce are employed for self-interest, the so-called checks on the executive are not able to stop it. This employment of power is called “delegative authority”. Guillermo O'Donnell denes it as: For those who hold political authority that I call “delegative”, the republican notion of restraint is counterintuitive. Why recognize power other than one's own when one is striving for the public good? Why not help your self, your relatives, and your associates while in ofce, if at the same time (at least notionally) you are aiming at some aspect of the public good? (O'Donnell Ibid.: 118).