Hannah Pimentel examines the effect of alliances based on political parties and political families on the public goods deficit in the Philippines. Exploring how the inadequate provision of public goods could stem from the unaligned expenditure preferences of mayors and vice mayors resulting in local budget surpluses. While political families can mitigate surplus budgets, this raises concerns about democratic accountability and poverty.
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The Philippines suffers from a massive underprovision of public goods where many villages do not have facilities that meet basic human needs. In 2020, data from the Census of Population and Housing showed that among the approximately 42,000 Filipino villages, only 5 percent have a hospital and 6 percent have a fire station. Even if most villages have health centers, elementary schools and community water systems, underprovision of public goods and services remains to be a prevalent problem that affects many Filipinos’ quality of life. In this piece, I explore reasons behind the underprovision of public goods and how the nature of Philippine politics induces or exacerbates this problem.
The Budget Surplus Trap And The Role Of Mayors And Vice Mayors
The most common reason for the underprovision of public goods and services cited in the literature is that the unfair Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) allocation among cities and municipalities leads to a lack of funds in poorer municipalities. Cities receive 23 percent of the IRA from the national government while municipalities get 34 percent. As of 2018, there are 145 cities and 1478 municipalities which leaves municipalities with a smaller proportion. This poses challenges for municipalities as most of them struggle to generate their own locally sourced revenue hence they heavily depend on IRA transfers. While it is true that the unfair allocation prevents better public goods provision in some places due to the reduction in funds, extensive financial data from the Bureau of Local Government Finance (BLGF) show that budget surpluses are common in both cities and municipalities. This suggests that lacking funds alone might not be the main cause of the underprovision of public goods.
Another factor could involve political dynamics between mayors and vice mayors which I further explore. The process of approving and implementing local public projects first involves a mayor proposing an executive budget plan. The local council led by the vice mayor then votes on it and if no budget can be authorized, the previous year’s budget will be enacted until the vice-mayor-led council can authorize a budget proposal. If the council cannot agree with the mayor’s budget proposal then the surplus can persist, trapping the locality in a cycle of budget surpluses. This is termed a “policy gridlock” wherein status quo policies remain in effect, preventing changes in current conditions. To avoid policy gridlock, mayors and vice mayors must have aligned preferences for policies to advance in legislative deliberations and to break from budget surpluses.
The Family Effect And The Lack Of Party Effect
Mayors and vice-mayors can be allied if they are from the same family or same party. Analyzing election results and financial data from 1992 to 2020 covering 1634 cities and municipalities, I find that family-related mayor and vice-mayor pairings decrease the surplus budget percent by 3.95 points compared to a non-family pairing during the first year in office. While this seems small, a 3.95-point increase in expenditure could be significant for poorer and relatively impoverished municipalities. On the other hand, party-allied pairings have no significant difference compared to non-party pairings on budget surplus.
Why do party pairings seem to have no effect but family pairings do? To understand why, one must understand how politics work in the Philippines. The experiment of Cesi Cruz and her co-authors found that Filipino voters prefer politicians who match their own platform preferences when given information on politicians’ platforms. Despite this, it is cheaper for politicians to buy votes instead of appealing through information about their platforms. On average, the cost of swaying each voter by using flyers and political canvassing about the politician’s platforms would cost US$31.25 per vote. On the other hand, the most expensive cost of literal vote buying is US$12.50 per vote and the compliance rate of voters whose vote was bought is around 80 to 85 percent. Since there is little incentive to appeal through policies and platforms, political parties that emerge tend to be indistinguishable in policy and ideology and instead serve as short-term alliances. Politicians often switch parties to access the dominant parties’ resources and patronage; from 1987 to 2010, 33.5 percent of lower-house legislators switched parties.
Unlike party pairings, family pairings have long-term private interests in the succession of political and economic power resulting in cohesive alliances and preferences. In the Philippines, 65 percent of mayors and 50 percent of vice mayors are from political families. Pablo Querubin found that elected congressional representatives and provincial governors who barely won elections were 5 times more likely to have a relative elected into office in the future. Despite the narrow winning margin, these incumbents are still able to provide their relatives with electoral advantages, probably through their access to public resources and social networks. The work of Cesi Cruz and her co-authors found that political families who are more connected through family networks in a locality enjoy higher vote shares because of closer access to voters making vote buying through cash, food, and health insurance easier. Since family pairings are the only type of alliance that reduce budget surpluses, cities and municipalities face trade-offs associated with democratic outcomes.
Implications Of The Family Effect
Political family rule is associated with implications to democratic accountability and economic outcomes. Vote buying through money or other individual goods is not a straightforward process. While politicians’ economic resources matter, they must also strategically select voters who comply when their vote is bought. While reward and reciprocity could incentivize voters to comply, it could also be because they feel coerced. The work of Nico Ravanilla and his co-authors found that well-connected voters feel that village-level political brokers know how they voted and that they can be penalized if they do not comply with instructions on election day. Interviews done by Cesi Cruz details experiences of a churchgoer who mentioned that if the number of votes the politician bought does not match the true total votes, the politician will retaliate against the Church. Another interviewee mentioned that they saw a mayor’s ally claiming that they have a list of voters and their voting choices. According to the mayor she interviewed, it is more important that voters think he monitored the votes than whether he truly monitored them.
Susan Stokes uses the term ‘perverse accountability” where instead of voters holding politicians accountable, it is the opposite where politicians hold voters accountable for how they voted. Perverse accountability is likely when vote buying is common, when politicians are indistinguishable in policy or ideology, and when politicians could somewhat guess how voters voted through social networks or political machines. These conditions lessen voter’s incentives to defect if their vote is bought. If perverse accountability is likely, it will be difficult for voters to hold politicians accountable and to have their interests represented because their own vote choices are constrained if coerced. Since political families have greater ability to buy votes through their networks then perverse accountability is likely in the Philippines. Political family rule is also associated with economic costs. There is an increase in provincial poverty by 1.3 percentage points in Visayas and Mindanao per 1 unit increase in the proportion of political families holding local positions.
In summary, family-related mayor and vice mayor pairings tend to have higher expenditures while party-allied ones do not have any effect. If the public goods underprovision in the Philippines is due to an inability to spend and break from surplus budgets, then family pairings are necessary but political family rule can lead to worse democratic outcomes and increases in poverty.
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*Banner photo by Jayson Lagman on Unsplash
*About the research: This blog is based on the Author’s dissertation for her LSE MSc Political Science and Political Economy, for which the Author was awarded SEAC’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.
*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.