Dismantling While Accumulating: Dynamics of Local Participatory Institutions in the Philippines

• Main Authors: Saguin, Kidjie, Medina-Guce, Czarina
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Local participation; Philippines; Policy accumulation; Policy dismantling; Public service bargain; Development Studies; Political Science; Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration; Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/dev-stud-faculty-pubs/277; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-65707-8_8
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The global trend of democratic backsliding is creating the right conditions for the curtailment of social and political rights, but equivocal evidence of full-scale dismantling of liberal policies is yet to be found. The mixed performance of democratic backsliding in fragile democracies, as we would argue, can best be explained by looking at how bureaucracies mount institutional resistance through public service bargains. We build this argument by contrasting the dynamics of (local) participatory institutions in the Philippines between a liberal government (Aquino) and an illiberal government (Duterte). In our analysis, we find simultaneous processes of (active and passive) dismantling and accumulation based on the salience of the issue within the president’s political agenda regardless of the existence of illiberal practices. We find that agency-level public service bargains struck differently across policy subsystems can offer provisional explanations for the mixed performance of democratic backsliding. Duterte increased policy density to establish political control over the peace and order local participatory institutions while leaving other local special bodies in the hands of bureaucracies. This subsystem-differentiated bargain allows for the emergence of pockets of democratic backsliding and pockets of democratic growth that could help explain bureaucratic resistance to political transitions such as democratic backsliding.