Still not very representative

THE concluding session of the outgoing 13th House of Representatives last Thursday ended in typical fashion — none of the pending bills were passed because there was a lack of quorum.

To make up for such a lackluster valedictory to another three-year chapter in Philippine lawmaking, House Speaker Jose de Venecia instead used the occasion to launch the year-long celebration marking the centenary of Congress. But even that was not without hitches as it was pointed out that the reference date was “historically inaccurate.”

Critics claim that the 100th year of the Philippine legislature should be reckoned from the day the Malolos Congress was convened in 1898 to draft a a constitution and to make laws for the newly born Philippine Republic, and not the inauguration of the Philippine Assembly in 1907 under the auspices of the Americans.

Bayan Muna Rep. Teodoro Casiño was thus led to remark how tracing Congress’s roots to the American-inspired Philippine Assembly can only attest to “the colonial mindset that has characterized the institution for the past century.”

“From 1907 till this day, Congress’s role has been to protect narrow foreign and elite interests. It is a House of big landlords, warlords, political dynasties, and politicians under the payroll of big business interests,” the party-list representative said.

The elitist tag on Congress is, of course, hardly new. In 2004, the PCIJ book, The Rulemakers, a study on the post-Marcos Congress, reaffirmed this tired yet troubling fact: our legislators constitute a select and exclusive segment of Philippine society. They are richer, older, better educated, and better connected than the rest of us. A great majority of them also belong to families whose members have been in public office for two or more generations. Such that they are hardly representative of the constituents they are supposed to represent.

It is, however, no longer true to refer to Congress as a landlord-dominated legislature as the sources of wealth of its members have become diversified.

Casiño should also realize that even the delegates of the Malolos Congress were a breed apart in terms of class, gender, education, even of geography.

Convened following the victorious Philippine revolution, the Malolos Congress brought together 120 elected delegates who were considered the best and the brightest of their generation. As noted in The Rulemakers, they were well-heeled, well-educated men from the cream of Philippine society. While composed mainly of landowners, many of whom had also been elected to municipal offices under the aegis of the Spanish colonial regime, the congress also counted 43 lawyers, 17 physicians, and practitioners of other professions.

Then as now, the bias has been for those with better education, proprietary wealth, and professional qualification. But equally important is being a member of a political family, which is considered an edge in the profession of politics. Proof of this is the enduring dominance of many families in Congress which trace their ascendance to politics during the U.S. colonial era starting with the 1907 Philippine Assembly. Among families that remain politically active to this day with members elected to the pre-Comonwealth legislature are:

• Apostol (Leyte)
• Aumentado-Boyles (Bohol)
• Bengson (Pangasinan)
• Borja (Bohol)
• Braganza/Ramos/Shahani (Pangasinan)
• Cojuangco/Teodoro (Tarlac)
• Cuenco (Cebu City)
• Daza (Northern Samar)
• De Venecia/Perez (Pangasinan)
• Dilangalen/Piang (Maguindanao
• Ponce Enrile (Cagayan)
• Fuentebella (Camarines Sur)
• Gullas (Cebu)
• Imperial (Albay)
• Lacson (Negros Occidental)
• Laguda/Ledesma (Negros Occidental)
• Lorenzo/Lobregat (Zamboanga City)
• Locsin (Iloilo/Negros Occidental/Leyte)
• Lopez (iloilo)
• Marcos (Ilocos Norte)
• Osmeña (Cebu)
• Palma Gil (Davao Oriental)
• Paras (Negros Oriental)
• Recto (Batangas)
• Rodriguez (Rizal)
• Romero (Negros Oriental)
• Roxas (Capiz)
• Ruiz/Soon-Ruiz (Cebu)
• Sandoval (Palawan/Navotas)
• Diaz (Nueva Ecija)
• Estrella (Pangasinan)
• Gonzales (Mandaluyong)

Taking into account the composition of the outgoing House of Representatives, we found hardly any changes that deviate from the PCIJ’s findings back in 2004. What follows therefore are excerpts (minimally edited for currency) from The Rulemakers written by Sheila S. Coronel, with updated tables incorporating data from the 13th House.

NOT VERY REPRESENTATIVE

THE typical Filipino legislator is male, middle aged, and college educated, most likely with a degree in law. He has previously held a local government post and is a member of a political family, with a sibling, father, or a grandfather who had been voted into public office in the past. There is one chance in two that he is related to a former legislator.

He is also into business and has multiple income sources. He has property for rent, earns salary from a profession, and his investments in company shares. He is well off, with a net worth (most likely understated in his statement of assets in the P10 million range. And the likelihood is that the longer he stays in Congress, the richer he becomes.

The typical representative or senator therefore is not the typical Filipino, who is likely to be below 35, with a few years of high-school education and an annual family income of about P150, 000 in 2000. The demographic profile couldn’t be more unmatched.

No legislature in the world is completely representative of its citizens. Even in the most advanced democracies, legislators are mostly male; they are also generally richer and better educated than the people they are also represent. They constitute elite whose attributes — whether these are education, wealth, intellect, social status, family origin, political skill, etc. — enable them to win legislative positions in popular elections.

The composition of legislatures therefore is an indicator of the qualities that enable individuals to contest political power and gain membership in the country’s political elite. The make up of legislative bodies also reflects the distribution of political power among various classes, geographical areas, and demographic sectors.

Six congresses — the Eighth to the 13th — have been constituted since the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The legislators elected to these bodies have hardly been representative of those they represent. In that sense, they have not been different in the past, when members of the Congress were drawn from a narrow elite in terms of property, education (since 1898, they have been trained mainly in law), and social standing.

There have been changes, though. There are now many more women in Congress than there have been in the past. Today’s legislators are also better educated than their predecessors, with many boasting of postgraduate degrees. The sources of their wealth are more diverse, indicating that many more business interests are represented in the Congress, which can no longer be described as a “landlord-dominated” legislature. The caciques of old have been replaced by real-estate developers, bankers, stockbrokers, and assorted professionals and businesspeople,

The changes reflect the changes in the Philippine economy, with the decline of agriculture and extractive industries (logging, mining) and the increasing importance manufacturing, trade and services. The changes have been obvious since the 1960’s, when new men form business and the professions were elected to the legislature, (Abueva, Wurfel 1988, Seibert 1969).

The rise of the new legislators mirrored the increasing political assertiveness of new sections of the business elite and the upper professional class that emerged in the 1950s and 60s. That period saw the birth of a manufacturing sector that produced previously imported goods for the local market. While many of those who became part of the manufacturing capitalists were large landowners, there were also those from the ranks of the new rich (Pinches 1996) and the sought seats in Congress.

Philippine legislatures have been hospitable to the entry of the newly affluent. Their ranks have been open to the constant infusion of new blood. The post-Marcos Congress is even more diverse in composition than its predecessors, it includes aside from the old landowning families that have been in legislatures for 100 years, also new entrepreneurs, especially those in construction, real estate, and services that emerged among the fastest growing economic sectors in the late 1980s and 1990s; middle class professionals, especially lawyers firm leading law firms, and leaders of nongovernmental organizations.

The legislature also has a local officials or government bureaucrats able to build a base in their districts even if they are not backed by old wealth. It accommodated celebrities form the movies, the mass media, and sports.

The legislature has traditionally opened to its members a world of privilege that enables the enterprising among them to take advantage of moneymaking and to accumulate wealth. A Congress seat can be used as a passport to the land of deal making, allowing inspiring politicians to the bastions of great wealth and privilege. In this sense, the legislature can be said to be an agent of mobility, allowing talented aspirants from the lower and middle classes entry to the narrow corridors of power and the most exclusive enclaves of the very rich.

Such mobility, however, is still limited to a narrow range of Philippine society. For sure, the more occupationally diverse membership form the more modern sectors of business, the mass media, and the civil society means a wider ranges of perspectives and interests than at any time in the past. The trend toward increasing diversification that was noted in the 1960s continues today. Moreover, the entry of party-list representatives in the 11th, 12th and 13th Congress enlarged that range, as it gave representatives of marginalized social sectors in the legislature. Despite this, however, Congress remains a fortress of privilege, its gate open to the new and aspiring rich, but closed — except for some narrow openings — to the poor and powerless.

The social and demographic composition of the present-day Congress helps explain why it remains conservative institution, resistant to reform and more inclined to preserve the privileges of the few.

But the legislature’s composition also helps explain why it has not been completely heedless of the demands for change and has occasionally been capable of progressive legislation, mainly in cases where it was politically expedient for Congress to enact reformist laws.

CONGRESS is aging. Representatives are older now than they were in the premarital law period. They would be older still, if the 1987 Constitution had not prohibited public officials from serving more than three consecutive terms. The ban enabled younger legislators, usually the kin of those who were already in office, to replace the older ones. For this reason a generational shift took place in Congress in 1998 and again 2001, which have more representatives below 35 than at any time in the past.

* No data provided by four House members

Age is an index of the openness of legislatures to new entrants: Young representatives could mean that age and relative inexperience are not barriers to entry. Over time, the average age of legislators is also an indication of the continuity of a legislative body and the longevity in that body of serving representatives.

Younger people are assumed to be more idealistic, more open to new ideas, and less likely to defend the established order. That is not always the case, of course. The spirited defense of entrenched interests by second- and third- generation politicians in the post-Marcos House shows that young people can be conservative — and as opportunistic — as their elders. Still, age can be seen as one, although, not by any means the most important, indicator of the ideological bent of a legislature.

The first postwar Congress, which opened in 1946, was a young body. This was attributed to the disruptions of World War II and the establishment of a new republic (Seibert 1969). Despite its relative youth, however, that Congress was a conservative assembly that ousted leftist representatives and approved granting parity rights to U.S citizens. The average age for representatives in 1946 was 45. It increased in subsequent years as incumbent legislators tended to be reelected.

The post-Marcos Congress is considerably older. Despite the closure on Congress in 1972 and the election of a rubber-stamp parliament in 1978 and 1984, the legislature that was elected after the fall of Marcos was not a break from the past but a continuation. Nearly one-third of the representatives who came to the office of the Eighth House that opened in 1987 had also been elected to the Marcos-era martial law Congress or were local government officials during the Marcos period. Only the remaining third were new entrants to politics (Gutierrez et al. 1992). Certainly, Table 2 reflects this continuity.

* No data provided by four House members

Term limits are a corrective to the aging of Congress over time. As shown in Table 1, the average age dropped form 53 in 1992, when there was a record number of three-termers in office to 51 in 1998, when those representatives were forced to bow out of Congress, even only temporarily. Table 2 shows the increasing numbers of legislators over 55 years old, an indication of the continued advantaged age and incumbency despite term limits. Indeed, the older legislators have also tended to be in public life longer, having been elected to either the legislature or local government office.

Among the older representatives in the post Marcos house were the likes of Alejandro Almendras, now deceased, a long-time legislator who served six terms in the pre-martial law Senate and was elected to the Ninth and 10th Congress. Herminio Teves, who was 81 when he was elected in 2001; Emilio Espinosa then 79; and Carlos Imperial then 71 had all served in the pre-Marcos Congress. All of these representatives come from well-established clans, and in fact the older legislators tend to have the same family background. Their continued reign therefore shows the edge that incumbents and political clans have in contesting legislative seats.

The dramatic decline over time in the number of legislators aged 35-45 — from nearly half the representatives in 1946 to less than 20 percent in the post-Marcos period — and the corresponding increase in the numbers of those in older age brackets can be seen as an indication of the same trend. Legislators tend to age in office because the turnover rate is slow, even if term limits helped speed it up. The impact of term limits, however, goes both ways, as seen in the increasing numbers of those in the 25-35 age groups in both the 11th and 12th House when legislators who had completed three terms relinquished their posts to their sons and daughters.

THE legislature has always been a male bastion. To begin with, until 1937, only men were allowed to vote and to be elected to public office. Although women were subsequently elected to local posts, they remained a marginal presence in the Congress. In 1965, there were only six female representatives, in 2001, the number increased nearly sevenfold to 40 women, the highest ever in the history of the legislature.

In the 1960s, the women in Congress were mainly those who had taken over the seats vacated by their husbands, who had either died or moved on to other posts (Seibert 1969).

Close to half of all the women in the post-Marcos house are also surrogates of their husbands or parents, but then, that is also true of male representatives, since many of them inherited their posts from their parents or grandparents.

At any rate, the assumption of more women shows that women increasingly acceptable as political heirs. Still, the percentage of women who are part of political clans — 65 percent in the 12th Congress — is higher than the ratio of clan membership (61 percent) for the House as a whole.

The bias goes for the party-list representatives as well. Only four of 20 members of party-list groups in the 12th House are women: That’s 21 percent of the total just three points higher than the percentage of women in the entire House. in the Senate, the numbers are even lower; only three senators elected in 2001 are women, about 12 percent. There were four elected in 1998.

* No data provided by two representatives
“Previously in the House” does not necessarily mean in the 12th Congress

The glass ceiling for women politics is therefore obvious in the legislature even if there are many more women in the Philippine Congress than there are in other Asian parliaments. Still, even if the Philippines has had two women presidents, women in public office are still in the minority from the barangay level up. Few women politician make it on their own. Most are elected because of the mobilization of family resources and the support of their male kin, once in the office, few take on women’s causes. Many end up being, in the words of newspaper columnist Rina Jimenez-David, “trapos in skirts”) Quindoza, Santiago 1998) or pale shadows of their husbands or fathers.