The Democratization of Vote-Buying in Virac, Catanduanes, Philippines

• In Event: Reimagining Political Participation in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

In developing countries, political reformers bestow much effort on the process of formation of representative democracies, assuming that participative governance follows after clean and honest elections. The whipping boy of such campaigns is culture, specifically the tradition of “patronage politics”. Supposedly, remnants of feudalism in society pervert both electoral process and actual governance. In elections, patronage politics had created a set of practices to ensure its interests, through violence, fraud, and vote-buying. Considered a show-case of democracy in Asia, the Philippines had gone through a history of struggle against patronage politics. By immediate appearances, success may have been achieved. The aftermath of so-called EDSA Revolution brought forth “democratic space” that signaled a new era of good governance. As a result, elections appear to be cleaner. Ironically however, such democratization seems to be responsible for the evolving of patronage politics to its more resilient form. While violence and fraud have considerably abated, vote-buying compensated to become patronage politics’ main weapon. This paper is a case study on Virac, the capital town of Catanduanes. Using ethnographic approach, the study illustrates how vote-buying has evolved in form according to changes in historical circumstances to produce its present more sophisticated version. Specifically, the democracy of post-EDSA politics seems to have created a free-market of the buy-and-sell of votes, making vote-buying immune from the moralist campaign of reformers because trading votes has become an exercise of democratic free choice.

Author

• Ramon Felipe Arcilla Sarmiento, Catanduanes State University