Rethinking Democratization in the Philippines: Elections, Political Families, and Parties 47 conceptually and logically necessary to include these factors in a working denition of democracy. For a number of reasons, we have not had any successful transition to a democratic regime or that we are now living in a democracy. We have failed to meet even the minimum conditions of a procedural democracy: free and fair elections. We have failed to show any signicant progress in achieving minimum outcomes that make possible the exercise and sustainability of democracy: the rule of law and improved quality of life indices, to mention just two of these critical factors. We have failed to develop effective institutions to ensure the “horizontal accountability” of public ofcials and agencies. At another level of public accountability, civil society organizations have done an invaluable job of monitoring the exercise of power and initiating reform advocacies but these same groups continue to be repressed and harassed by powerful political clans and oligarchic blocs.4 In the same vein, the full potential of the decentralization process to empower and democratize local government constituencies continues to be blocked by the resilience of oligarchic and clan families in many local areas. There exist strong comparative empirical ndings that democratic regimes are best sustained by strong economic conditions. One major study shows that “democracies survive in afuent societies whatever may be happening to them,” that “they are brittle in poor countries,” and that “per capita income is by far the best predictor of the survival of democracies” (Przeworski et al. 2000: 137). Other major studies also support the nding that prospects for sustaining democratization are lower in societies with high levels of inequality (Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). In particular, Boix's study also shows that presidential systems with low per capita incomes and high levels of income inequality (as measured by the Gini index) face higher rates of observed failures and probability of regime breakdown (2003: 150-155). Thus, it is imperative to include a regime performance dimension in dening democratic systems since a process of democratization can hardly be sustained in the absence of signicant improvements in the material welfare and socio-political conditions of the people. In sum, Miranda points out that “a dimension of regime performance is what separates formal or paper democracies from those that demonstrably protect and promote the welfare of the people” (2011:3). Second, consistent with this critique of a mainly procedural denition of democracy, our understanding of the public accountability of authorities and rulers in a democratic system is not limited to citizen participation in electoral exercises but must include citizen participation through their active political civil society organizations. By adding this dimension, the concept of public accountability of the ofcials in a democratic system is thus substantially expanded to include the intervention and participation of civil society groups in the political process. This new dimension of accountability in fact gains saliency in political systems like the Philippines where electoral exercises have been