30 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Figure 3. Poverty Self-Ra ng (March 2001 to July 2016/Philippines) to be its effective, substantive operations over time, then one's view of a "really existing democracy," or an "effective democracy" would have to echo that of Sen's as he approvingly cites former Filipino president, Fidel V. Ramos (Sen, 1999:158); stressing demonstrated performance over the formal dimension of political governance, Ramos had pointedly observed: "The political challenge for people around the world today is not just to replace authoritarian regimes by democratic ones. Beyond this, it is to make democracy work for ordinary people." Clearly, by this uncompromisingly operationalizing standard, Philippine governance across the years can no longer be viewed as a working democratic proposition. After decades of development-bonsaing if not outrightly development-aborting political and economic underperformance, why must analytically-minded probers, including those who carry professional credentials as governance experts, fail to see that a consistently non-working "democracy" might really be something else, perhaps a successful nondemocratic regime, one that is even probably a functional, non-democratic oligarchy? Some of the world's leading researchers, looking into attributes of democracy other than primarily humanist socioeconomic development concerns (e.g. free, competitive elections) have expressed similarly skeptical thoughts and raised timely caveats in assessing current democracy and democratization claims (O'Donnell, 2010:30; Schmitter, 2010:19). Recapitulating the arguments against a reading of democratic governance in the Philippines, one winds up with the following observations, many already elaborated on in earlier parts of this essay and others more substantively discussed by writers collaborating with the author in the present study: