252 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition … changing the constitutional framework of a country has a small impact on the stability of a democratic regime. . .When a society is sufciently equal or when capital is sufciently mobile, democracy prevails regardless of the rules (parliamentarism, plurality rule, and so on) employed. When a society is acutely unequal, no constitutional rule can sustain democracy (2003: 15). Looking forward to a long-term response to horizontal accountability issues and the overall problem of democratic consolidation, Ronas advocates a broad coalition of reform encompassing concerned government ofcials and various civil society organizations. To provide a more focused arena of mobilization and organization, these reform coalitions can be organized along specic issues such as the passage of the Freedom for Information Act, working for just, negotiated political solutions to the armed conict, ending the culture of impunity on corruption and human rights violations, completing the agrarian reform process, ensuring credible and fair elections, and substantially reducing poverty and income inequality, to name a few of such actions that will no doubt advance the democratization process. Civil Society, Local Governments, and Democratization The contribution by Holmes examines whether two generally acknowledged “democratizers” --- civil society and decentralization--- have indeed facilitated the democratization process in the country. Starting with a cautionary note, he argues that “both arenas have suffered innate systemic limits and therefore have not really propelled the democratization process in the country”. Dening the concept of civil society is a highly contested exercise and in this study, Holmes adopts a framework drawn from Alagappa (2004) and Anheir et al. (2010) that privileges groups somehow oriented toward a set of “public goods” that include: “accountability of public ofcials, more inclusive representation, equitable development and an intrinsic goal, autonomy,” particularly from government. This set of orienting goals are generally consistent with the prescriptions of many political theorists on the functions that independent groups and associations of civil society perform for democracies such as: “1) a center of collective political resistance against capricious and oppressive government; 2) to organize people for democratic participation; and 3) socialization into the political values necessary for selfgovernment” (Rosenblum and Post 2002: 17-18). Such a denition of civil society groups and their functions is consistent with this book's expanded understanding of the public accountability mechanism through which citizens make their public ofcials accountable both through the electoral process and the impact of “politically active civil society groups”. However, we also need to address the collective impact of many nonpolitically active civil society groups whose political apathy by itself also necessarily affects the dynamics of public accountability. Holmes recognizes this concern as he discusses the problems faced by civil society groups in trying