The Romanticism of Elections

As the election season officially commenced in the Philippines this week, it has become quite fashionable among prominent local commentators to romanticise the current Philippine presidential race of 2010 painting it in the epic proportions of a contest between the forces of good and evil. An example of this is a recent column by Mr Manolo Quezon, a former speechwriter for Pres Gloria Arroyo in which he traces the political genealogy of all presidential contenders to the traditions belonging to one of two leading protagonsists in the 1986 people power uprising, former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino.

It becomes apparent that Mr Quezon regards only one candidate, Benigno Aquino III, the only son of Corazon, worthy of claiming the mantle of democracy represented by his late great mother. All others it would seem belong to “the wrong side of history” as Pres Marcos had been in 1986. A win by any of these candidates would be “impermissible” from Mr Quezon’s perspective. The dark and ominous undertones of such a statement are evident. Either election officials conclude with an outcome consistent with History (with a capital H), or the forces under the Aquino banner might or should enforce their own will on the situation and produce the right outcome from their perspective.

I don't think it is accurate to paint this race using such a broad brush. It would be an oversimplification of what the candidates, Mr Aquino and everyone else, truly represent. I don't think for instance it is fair to associate any one candidate with the repressive authoritarian regime of Mr Marcos for instance. Not one of them is espousing a return to dictatorial rule, but anyone including Mr Aquino could be capable given the right circumstances of taking the country down a path of greater repression of civil liberties and weakening of property rights as the embattled rule of Mrs Arroyo so aptly demonstrated through her flirtations with emergency powers.

A more balanced approach would produce a nuanced view of the two leading contenders, Messrs Aquino and Manuel Villar, a self-made Fortune 500 tycoon with a rags-to-riches story. It would show the evolution of two previously flawed attempts at addressing the problem of underdevelopment in the Philippines which they, on the face of it, represent and hope to redeem.

One strand, implicitly espoused by Mr Villar, has sought to deal with the rent-seeking nature of a weak state by centralising rule-making with the chief executive and by so doing reduce the potential for petty corruption elsewhere. This is a situation which makes the office he would occupy prone to intensive lobbying, but by the same token, present an improvement on the current situation of chaotic decentralised plunder. With a more disciplined bureaucracy and a coherent strategy, rapid development as illustrated by the East Asian economies becomes possible.

This assumes of course that the chief executive himself is disciplined and capable of resisting intense pressure to collude with powerful interest groups. But even if he succumbs to such pressure, the founder of the Corruption Perception Index (transparency.org) Johann Lambsdorff has found that investors actually prefer grand corruption over petty corruption (!) presumably because of the greater predictability that the former affords.

The problem though with this strand is that in some cases corruption does serve a purpose in enabling productive sectors of society to overcome stifling regulatory hurdles in the pursuit of greater value and output within the economy. By centralising rule-making, the executive also centralises deal-making, which means that only a select group of associates and hangers-on can take advantage of the unique opportunities that abound under a crafty and entrepreneurial president as demonstrated by the past administrations of Messrs Marcos and Joseph Estrada (ousted and convicted for plunder but later pardoned by Mrs Arroyo and now placed third by many pollsters in the race to succeed her).

This lessens the amount of investments made by other players due to fears of expropriation by those closely linked with the administration, a point that is exemplified by a scandal involving Mr Villar’s commercial property ventures and two nearly identical road projects. One was publicly funded, thanks to Mr Villar’s intervention as the head of a powerful Senate finance committee, the other privately financed under a fee for use basis. The private venture eventually backed down due to competition from Mr Villar's free access road that conveniently wound through his commercial neighborhood projects.

The other strand promoted by Mr Aquino seeks to maintain the current system of decentralised rule-making and with it the petty corruption that prevails, but what it seeks to introduce is greater transparency and participation in the system. By all accounts, this is arguably the only legitimate means of prying the state loose from the clutches of special interest groups.

The challenge of course is achieving this goal with the meager resources that a third world nation can ill afford to waste given the multitude of development programs it needs to fund. If even the well resourced governments of advanced economies find it troublesome if not costly to enforce such institutions. (An eminent economist in the field, Douglas North, puts the price tag at 35-40% of GDP. What hope is there then for a cash-strapped government that can only raise a mere 14-7% at best?)

Ironically, pursuing “good government” through a costly enforcement system might in the long-run lead to greater corruption. This is a view endorsed by some leading institutional economists. And in the Philippines, it could be argued, the confiscation and sale of assets acquired illegitimately by public officials that begun under Mrs Aquino has itself become a source of corruption.

So in the end what we are left with are permutations of previously failed or flawed experiments espoused by members of the ruling elite in the hope of vindicating the competing hypotheses adopted by their predecessors in addressing the underdevelopment problem of the country. It is not that one candidate is on the right side of history and the other is not. What each party is seeking at this point is a way to carve out a place in history that would suit their own personal narratives.