Social Forces Responsible for Local Autonomy in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippine political system is an amalgam of 52 provinces headed by elective Governors serving four-year terms of office, dozens of urban and semi-urban communities chartered into cities by the national legislature and governed by City Mayors some of whom were presidential appointees before the passage of an omnibus city law making all these offices elective, hundreds of municipalities run by popularly elected Municipal Mayors, and thousands of rural villages called barrios which are romanticized in Filipino political circles as the place of redemption for those who have lost their souls. On top of these layers of political units is an omnipotent central government headed by a President whose constitutional powers of general supervision over all these local entities are exercised in the form of appointing city department heads such as police chiefs and city attorneys and reviewing city and municipal budgets before they go into effect. Another form in which these powers are exercised are the naming of barrios and city streets and the changing of the names of these barrios and city streets the exercise of which is shared by a bicameral legislature of more than 100 Congressmen and 24 Senators. Thus the polity that is the Philippine national government today is virtually a prototype of its predecessors, the Spanish and American colonial bureaucracies in the island, which charted the course of Filipino political development in years gone by. The purpose of this article is to discuss the role social forces played in the improvement of central-local relationships and evaluate the significance of these improvements in the context of Filipino ideas of politics and in the framework of their government.