The poor vote is a thinking vote

This two-part series tries to describe the characteristics of the so-called “poor vote.” The first part, based on the findings of the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC), lists the qualifications that poor voters look for in their candidates and the factors that influence their vote.

Based on the results of 16 focus-group discussions in rural and urban poor communities throughout the country, the IPC study shatters stereotypes about the poor voter. It’s key findings include:

• The poor ranked education, experience, platform, and track record as among the most important criteria for choosing candidates.
• They do not necessarily have high regard for the wealthy and powerful. What they do have are idealistic notions of leadership, valuing qualities such as piety (makadiyos), helpfulness, sincerity, and responsibility.
• Celebrities are not necessarily preferred by poor voters. Many said they value educational qualifications, but they were also suspicious about those with superior education. They said experience and good intentions more than compensate for a lack of college education.
• The most import sources of influence in the choice of candidates among the poor are, in declining order: the media, the family, the church, and political parties. Surveys come in last on the list.

THE POOR, who make up the bulk of Filipino voters, have been blamed for the sorry state of electoral politics and the low level of election discourse. Pundits, analysts, and media commentators say that because of poverty, many voters are vulnerable to patronage, vote buying, and simplistic messages. The masa vote is popularly perceived to be dumb, unthinking, and prone to manipulation.

But the results of 16 focus-group discussions conducted by the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) of the Ateneo de Manila University shatter these stereotypes. Instead, the discussions, which were held in urban and rural poor communities in various parts of the country in March and April, show that the poor vote is a thinking vote.

The poor ranked education, experience, platform, and track record as among the most important criteria for choosing candidates. Contrary to common belief, they do not necessarily have high regard for the wealthy and powerful. What they do have are idealistic notions of leadership, valuing qualities such as piety (makadiyos), helpfulness, sincerity, and responsibility.

Poor people take the vote seriously and while they are drawn to the fiesta atmosphere of elections and have negative perceptions of this political exercise as one that is prone to cheating and manipulation, they also see the process as legitimate and consider their participation as an opportunity to bring about change.

If there is anyone to blame, the IPC findings indicate, fingers should be pointing at the politicians who do not live up to the poor’s expectations as well as an electoral system that is flawed and offers citizens a paucity of choices.

“Contrary to some quarters that question the intelligence of the poor, this study shows that the poor know what kind of leader they want,” says the IPC report. “However, the electoral process often fails to provide them with the good leaders they seek. The value of good leadership is often watered down by the pragmatics of elections. They see through the negative aspects of elections, yet recognize its importance in the life of the nation.”

Another problem the poor have, though, is that they take their cues on the suitability of candidates mainly from the mass media, which do not always give a complete or accurate picture of the qualifications of the contenders. The IPC findings thus confirm the perception of political parties and campaign staff that the media are emerging as the main electoral arena.

The poor as a category is variously defined. According to official statistics, 39.5 percent of Filipinos, or more than five million families, lived below the poverty threshold in 2000. Survey organizations, however, refer to lower-income groups as belonging to “D” and “E” classes that are estimated to make up as much as 93 percent of some 43 million Filipino voters. According to the Social Weather Stations (SWS), the D class, which makes up 60 percent of all voters, comprises lower-middle class households “who have some comfort and means but basically thrive on a hand-to-mouth existence.” The E class, comprising 33 percent of households, is the extremely lower class “who evidently face great difficulties in meeting their basic survival needs.”

The monthly income of a Class D household is P8,000 to P14,999 if living in Metro Manila and P4,000 to P9,999 elsewhere. That of a Class E household is below P8,000 if living in Metro Manila and below P4,000 outside the capital.

The first time in the post-Marcos era that the poor vote was seen as significant was in the 1998 presidential elections. The SWS’s May 11, 1998 exit poll found that class, more than age, gender, or geography determined the vote. The great majority (91.1 percent) of voters in the D and E classes voted for Joseph Estrada.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, however, also owed many of her votes to the lower and poorest classes. At the time a vice-presidential candidate, Arroyo enjoyed an absolute majority of the votes among the lower and poorest classes-D (51.1 percent) and E (52.4 percent).

Interestingly, unlike in 1998, there does not appear to be a distinct poor vote in 2004. Despite the popular conception that the poor will choose the movie-star candidate like they did six years ago, the surveys so far show that the poor vote is split among the various presidential contenders. The polls show that even the top two candidates are each getting only roughly a third of the D and E votes, with the remaining third split among those preferring other contenders and the undecided.

The findings of the April 10-17 SWS survey say that both Arroyo and movie actor Fernando Poe Jr. each have a 36-percent share of the Class E vote, while Arroyo leads in Class D with a 34-percent share compared to Poe’s 31 percent. Moreover, Arroyo’s share of the E vote increased four points t from the 32-percent share of the E vote she scored in the March 21-29 poll.

The surveys, however, show a distinct upper-class preference for Arroyo, who got a 43-percent share of the A, B, and C votes in the latest SWS survey compared to only 10 percent for Poe. Roco also rated high among upper-middle class voters.

In addition, the SWS survey shows a significant number of undecided voters. In the D class, 11 percent, and in E, nine percent, were undecided whom to vote for president, compared to eight and seven percent, respectively, in the polls taken in mid-March.

This year’s candidates for both national and local posts could mine the IPC report for insights on what poor voters are thinking and what may happen on May 10. As the late U.S. political consultant Lee Atwater once said, the conversations in focus groups “give you a sense of what makes people tick and a sense of what is going on in people’s minds and lives that you simply can’t get with survey data.”

The IPC’s focus-group discussions-intensive two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half-hour discussions with ordinary citizens-were held by trained social scientists in the cities of Metro Manila, Baguio, Cebu, and Zamboanga and in rural Camarines Sur, Iloilo, and Davao del Sur. Those taking part were not community or political leaders but were more or less typical residents representative of the profiles of their communities-urban participants were blue-collar workers with high school to college education, while the rural poor were mainly farmers with elementary to high school education.

Each discussion involved on average 10 persons. Six groups were made up of all male participants aged 30 years or more. Five were adult females 30 years old and above, while young voters below age 30 made up another five groups.

The discussions indicated that celebrities are not necessarily preferred by poor voters and that the rich and famous do not necessarily have the edge. Neither do the educated. In fact, while many among the focus-group participants said they value educational qualifications, they were also suspicious about those with superior education.

Many said that experience and good intentions more than compensate for a lack of college education, which may explain the Erap vote in 1998. After all, Estrada was not just a film star, but had served as mayor of San Juan, Metro Manila for decades before becoming senator and then vice president.

At the same time, the value attached to a leader’s education is conditional: This is seen as important only when the leader has integrity, vision, and wisdom as well.

The IPC noted that while the discussions on leadership elicited positive responses, the discussions on elections got overwhelmingly negative responses. Elections are widely viewed as a game of chance, a gamble. This view is not peculiar to the poor. But, as the IPC study pointed out, “this perspective allows them to go through the campaign period… and come to terms with election outcomes without, in a sense, losing hope in the system. Any game of chance entails risks-there are only two possibilities for one’s candidate: either win or lose. And every game of chance involves cheating. The poor are resigned to such realities of life. Hence, regardless of the outcome, life will go on.”

Thus, the ambivalence of the poor about elections. The focus-group discussions show they are wise-and wizened- enough to know that the exercise involves fraud and deception. Yet elections to them are also the only legitimate means to choose leaders. So they take part wholeheartedly in the process. For this reason, the poor vote in their numbers in every election: The voter turnout among the poor in the Philippines has historically been higher than that among the more affluent classes.

This finding has implications for armed groups like the New People’s Army, which remain unyielding in their vision of people’s war and of radical change through armed revolution. Similarly, the findings seem to indicate that extraconstitutional attempts to overthrow governments, like those launched by rebellious military officers, are not likely to find support among the poor. This could also partly explain why the “people power” uprisings were mainly middle-class events and saw only little participation from poorer social sectors.

While elections are seen as a spectator sport, the poor are not passive spectators. They cheer on or boo and take part wholeheartedly. “Perhaps their ambivalent attitudes toward elections are subsumed by the notion of a game of chance, which provides elections with an inherent validity as well as entertainment value,” says the IPC report. “Hence, they will participate in it by following certain criteria and principles. Most are not swayed by survey results. But, given their material needs, they will also take advantage of the money and goods that circulate widely at this time, if they can somehow escape the consequences.”

These contradictory views of elections — one instrumentalist (getting from the exercise whatever benefits they can) and the other, more idealistic (elections as the means to effect change) — seem to coexist happily.

This contradiction is evident as well in the views of the poor on vote buying. All those who took part in the focus-group discussions believe that vote buying is wrong. Yet another consensus was that they would accept the money and vote whomever they preferred, as long as they are assured there was no way that their actual vote could be checked.

The ambivalence is also marked in the way in which the focus-group participants believe that cheating and deception are part of elections, even as they accept the process as legitimate and are generally resigned to the outcomes.

The contradiction is seen again in how they believe in what the media report and project, while at the same time intensely decoding what they see and hear from media reports.

But there was hardly any ambivalence in how the participants saw surveys in relation to how they would vote. Their responses debunk the notion that voters are taken in by the bandwagon effect of survey results-that is, they are likely to vote for the perceived leader in the race.

Most of the participants, despite age, gender and geographical differences, said that surveys were irrelevant to their choice of candidates. There were two reasons cited for this: the first was a distrust of surveys and the other is the conviction that one should vote for candidates based on qualifications and track record, regardless of what the surveys say.

“The relative unimportance of surveys among the poor,” says the IPC report, “raises the question: Are surveys significant primarily for the middle and upper classes? The answer will probably vary depending on the exact configuration of each election. Still, in the game of life, one can say that perhaps the rich are used to winning, while the poor are accustomed to losing. It would be ironic if, ‘as losers,’ the poor turn out to be the more principled voters when compared with the highly educated middle and upper classes.”

Indeed, the report shows that overall, the most import sources of influence in the choice of candidates among the poor are, in declining order: the media, the family, the church, political parties. Surveys come in last on the list. The much-vaunted influence of the established churches may therefore be overstated, even though poor voters value piety (makadiyos) among their leaders.

Urban voters rated the media as the most crucial in influencing their vote while rural voters tended to give slightly more importance to family and church. The media were seen as crucial in providing information about candidates even before the campaign period, such as what incumbent officials have accomplished.

“The poor analyze the images projected by candidates, whether they are heard on the radio or seen on TV to gauge the character of a person. For instance, rural women try to observe how a candidate speaks, especially if the person ‘speaks with respect,'” says the IPC report. “Rural males also assess a candidate’s manner of speaking; they gaze at the face of the candidate; and observe how the candidate stands up or walks, and how the person deals with people. Urban participants similarly obtain cues about character by observing the manner of speaking and the person’s physical appearance.”

Some young voters, meanwhile, say they can glean character from the way the candidate looks at the camera and their manner of speaking or responding to questions during a debate. One youth apparently tries to observe if the candidate “can look you straight in the eye. They say liars have unstable eye movements.”

But the poor think they do not get enough information from the media, especially on candidates running for national positions. As one woman resident of an urban poor community said, “News reveals only what candidates did the particular day of the campaign and not what they want to do, what they have already done, what they have accomplished or want to accomplish.”

There was a gender gap when it came to how much family influenced voting. Women deemed discussions among family members as very influential in determining the vote. Urban women, in particular, were adamant that the family should not be divided on its choice of candidates. But urban men did not have a consensus on whether the family should have a unified vote. Observes the IPC: “The gender differential appears to enter the picture, with women acceding to the men in order to avert conflict. Men, on the other hand, tend to take pride in their seeming autonomy at making electoral choices.”

The youth, meanwhile, asserted their right to choose their own candidates even as they identified the family as an important factor influencing their votes. Some rural youths said they would choose their parents’ candidates to preserve family. This indicates that there may be no such a thing as a homogeneous youth vote, leading the IPC report to conclude that, “assertions concerning a ‘youth vote’ ought to be subjected to further examination.”

Another conclusion that can be drawn from the IPC findings is that raising the quality of Philippine elections does not have to wait until Filipinos are lifted from poverty. The reverse seems to be true: Electoral and political reforms, rather than increased affluence of the poor, appear to be the key to improving the country’s political and economic life.