Republic of the Philippines

Cebu Normal University

College of Teacher Education
Osmeña Boulevard, Cebu City Philippines 6000

ABAIGAIL M. LAWAS
MAED- SOCIAL STUDIES
COMPARATIVE POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES

REACTION PAPER #3

POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICAL

ENGINEERING IN ASIA PACIFIC REGION

The article of Benjamin Reilly talks about how political reformers across
the Asia-Pacific region have responded to the reality of their internal diversity
by deliberate, innovative, and often highly ambitious forms of political
engineering. Looking back to the success of the East Asian ‘Tigers’ and their
unorthodox but successful interventions in the economic arena, many
democratizing Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island states are
now seeking to manage political change by far-reaching reforms to their
electoral, parliamentary, and party systems. The geographical focus of the
article is primarily Indonesia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines.
I learned that there are different approaches in political engineering.
First, initial attempts to reduce political fragmentation. An example of this is
Indonesia. in which new parties must prove that they have branches in two-
thirds of Indonesia’s provinces and in two-thirds of the regencies within those
provinces. Each regency-level party unit must also demonstrate at least 1,000
members (or at least one-thousandth of the population in smaller regencies).
Only broadly supported candidates are elected. Two rounds of voting are
planned; in order to avoid the second round, first round winners will have to
gain over 50 percent of all votes as well as at least 20 percent in half of all
provinces also known as “distribution requirement”. The aim is to ensure that
the winning candidate not only has majority support, but also is able to attract
support across most parts of the country. Second, retarding political
fragmentation has costs as well as benefits. – In Indonesia, The new laws
benefit incumbent parties by restricting the level of political competition and
place real barriers on new entrants into the political marketplace while in
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Thailand, the 1997 constitutional reforms, which aimed to combat political
instability and fractionalization, contained so many incentives favoring strong
parties that they may have worked too well, upsetting the balance of Thai
politics.

Third, many of the new rules have profound impacts on the political expression
of ethnicity and thus on the potential for ethnic politics. For example in
Indonesian party laws was to make mono-ethnic, regionalist and separatist
parties unviable. It is literally impossible for a party to get its name on the
ballot in Indonesia today unless it can demonstrate the level of national
support that is likely to be beyond reach of even the most well organized
regional movement.

The development of a national party system is seen as an essential step both

in countering secessionism and in building a viable democracy

These experiments in the political engineering of party systems in Asia and

the Pacific, while not yet the subject of much attention, are likely to have
important consequences for the future of democracy and governance across
the region.
If we are going to look in the Philippine context,

Another means of encouraging party aggregation is the use of “vote-pooling”

electoral systems such as the alternative vote, in which electors rank-order
candidates on the ballot, marking “1” for their favored candidate, “2” for their
second choice, “3” for their third choice, and so on. If no candidate has an
absolute majority of “1” votes, the candidate with the lowest number of “1”
votes is eliminated and his or her ballot papers are redistributed to remaining
candidates according to the lower-order rankings marked. This process of
sequential elimination and transfer of votes continues until a majority winner
emerges. Because they make politicians from different parties reciprocally
dependent on vote transfers from their rivals, such systems can encourage

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cross-party cooperation and aggregation by rewarding joint campaigns, pre-
election coalitions, and other forms of inter-party collaboration with increased
prospects of electoral success.

Second Approach in Political Engineering

- Use reforms to the electoral system to influence the number of parties
and hence the shape of the party system.
- Thailand and Philippines have introduced mixed electoral system in
which around 80 percent of members of parliament are elected by
plurality rules from single-member districts, while 20 percent are chosen
by proportional representation from a national partylist.
- In Thailand, district MP’s are explicitly charged with playing a role in in
issues of national, not local, importance. Most of Thai cabinet is now
drawn from this small group of national MPs, rather than from district
representatives. On the other hand, the national seats in the Philippines
have a different purpose: not open to established parties but are
designed to represent sectoral interests and marginalized groups such
as youth, labor, the urban poor, farmers, fishermen and women. Any
group securing 2 percent of the national-list vote gets a seat up to a
maximum of three seats.
- The national-lists seats resulted in more diversity within parliament.
Some have argued that the only way to get genuine party development
and accountability in the Philippines is to allocate a much larger portion
of the seats to the national lists, remove the cap on the number of seats
available to each party, and allow all parties to participate in the
national-list component of elections.
- In Thailand, for example,
- parties competing for party-list seats must attain at
- least 5 percent of the vote, a provision that discourages
- splinter parties. Coupled with the electoral system
- change (described above) and restrictions on
- “party hopping” (described in the next section), this has seen a sharp
drop in party system fractionalization,
- with the number of significant parties in Thailand
- falling by more than half between 1995 and 2001.

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 - From the recently concluded election the COMELEC proclaims 51 winning
groups in 2019 party-list elections. The party-list group Anti-Crime and
Terrorism Community Involvement and Support (ACT-CIS) tops the
race, gaining the maximum of 3 seats in the House of Representatives
followed by Bayan Muna also gaining 3 seats.

- Political parties that failed to gain more than 2 percent of seats in the
lower house of parliament, or atleast 3 percent of seats in regional
assemblies, had to merge with other parties to surmount these
thresholds in order to contest future elections. These attempts to
engineer the merging party system in Thailand and Indonesia are
particularly significant in the context of each country’s troubled
democratic past.

- Thailand has a long history of fragmented party politics leading to

ineffectual coalition governments and often, military coups. Indonesians
also blamed fragmented and polarized party system of the 1950’s for
the failure of democracy then and are determined not to see it happen
again.

The third approach to a party system reform has been to strengthen party
organization by privileging party interests over those of independent, non-
party actors within the structure of government. In both Indonesia, the
electoral law gives parties specific responsibilities in terms of political
education, interest articulation and government function and party leaders are
given significant power in terms of candidate selection and replacement.

- Other countries have attempted to build a stable party system from the
top down by encouraging the cohesiveness of political parties in
parliament. One way to do this is to restrict the capacity of MPs to
change parties once elected known as “anti-hopping”. This provision
aim to strengthen parties’ control over their members in order to
maintain government stability.

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 - However , some candidates may be nominated by several parties or a
party may endorse multiple candidates in the same race which is
common in Asia Pacific regions where political parties are largely
irrelevant and voters choose candidates based on clan kinship rather
than party affiliation.

I learned that there are different approaches in political engineering. First,

initial attempts to reduce political fragmentation.
Second retarding political fragmentation has costs as well as benefits. – In
Indonesia, The new laws benefit incumbent parties by restricting the level of
political competition and place real barriers on new entrants into the political
marketplace. In Thailand, the 1997 constitutional reforms, which aimed to
combat political instability and fractionalization, contained so many incentives
favoring strong parties that they may have worked too well, upsetting the
balance of thai politics.
Third, many of the new rules have profound impacts on the political expression
of ethnicity and thus on the potential for ethnic politics. For example in
Indonesian party laws was to make mono-ethnic, regionalist and separatist
parties unviable. It is literally impossible for a party to get its name on the
ballot in Indonesia today unless it can demonstrate the level of national
support that is likely to be beyond reach of even the most well organized
regional movement.

The development of a national party system is seen as an essential step both

in countering secessionism and in building a viable democracy

These experiments in the political engineering of party systems in Asia and

the Pacific, while not yet the subject of much attention, are likely to have
important
consequences for the future of democracy and governance across the region