Chapter 17
History and Context
of the Development of
Public Administration
in the Philippines1
Danilo R. Reyes |
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Contents |
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17.1 |
Introduction................................................................................................................... |
334 |
17.2 |
The Philippines: A Brief Background ............................................................................. |
334 |
17.3 |
Pre-Colonial Era in the Philippines................................................................................ |
336 |
17.4 |
Philippine Bureaucracy during the Spanish Colonial Regime ......................................... |
338 |
17.5 |
Short-Lived Philippine Republic: Beginnings of a Professional Civil Service.................. |
341 |
17.6 |
American Colonial Regime and the Philippine Commonwealth.................................... |
342 |
17.7 |
Japanese Interregnum, 1942–1945 ................................................................................. |
344 |
17.8 Independence Period and the Establishment of the Institute of Public |
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Administration........................................................................................................ |
345 |
17.9 |
Administrative Values in the Philippines........................................................................ |
349 |
17.10 Reflections on the Origin of Public Administration as a Study in the Philippines ........ |
350 |
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17.11 Conclusions .................................................................................................................. |
352 |
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References ................................................................................................................................ |
352 |
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1I am grateful to Perla Patacsil, former head of the NCPAG library, for going over the manuscript and editing it to correct grammar and spelling errors. My thanks also to Teresita J. Calub of the NCPAG Library for helping me secure important materials and documents.
333
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334 Public Administration in Southeast Asia
17.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses the history, contexts and significant milestones that marked the development of the Philippine administrative system today, and the field of study that emerged to support it.
Like many other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, public administration in the Philippines evolved and shaped from a constellation of influences from its colonial past. Subsequently, it was compelled to adapt to the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of Filipino culture and temperament. Its structure and functional features today consistently retain the patterns inherited from the American colonial period. The public administration’s behavioral dynamics and practice, however, follow and assume distinct Filipino characteristics and traits, adjusted and superimposed on explicit structures and formalities manifested in Western bureaucratic models.
17.2 The Philippines: A Brief Background
Located in Southeast Asia, bounded by the China Sea to the West, the Celebes Sea to the South, and the Philippine Sea to the East, the Philippines is an archipelagic country with an estimated population of about 82 million in 2005. It is separated from Taiwan in the North with Indonesia and Malaysia as its neighbors to the Northwest. Found just below Taiwan and about 530 km at its Northern tip from the nearest coast of China, the Philippines has over 7,000 islands and an area of about 300,000 km2 (115,800 square miles). The country has an irregular coastline spanning to about 10,850 statute miles, roughly twice as long as that of the continental United States and is endowed with a landscape characterized by coastal mangroves, fertile plains, tropical jungles, rugged mountains drained by small river systems, and active volcanoes (Cariño, 1988; Agoncillo and Guerrero, 1977).
With a population predominantly of Malay stock, the country is also composed of other ethnic races, mainly of Chinese origins and ancestry. The majority of the people are Roman Catholic with a considerable Muslim minority, as well as other Christian denominations.
The Philippines was a colony of Spain for over 300 years until a successful revolution in 1896 when it declared independence on June 12, 1898. T he Philippines may well be considered the fi rst republican state in Asia, having promulgated what can be regarded as the fi rst republican constitution in the region in 1899, now commonly referred to as the Malolos Constitution.2 However, the independence of the fledgling republic was frustrated when the islands were ceded to the United States by Spain under the Treaty of Paris, which also ended the Spanish-American War.
The Americans gained control of the Philippines after a brief Filipino resistance to American rule, which eventually paved the way for the United States to institute a colonial government in 1900. During the American colonial regime, the country established a system of government and a political structure that followed the American model. Many of the institutions in the Philippines today, such as the bureaucracy, the educational system, and various aspects of culture and practices, reflect American influence. In 1935, the Philippine Commonwealth was established under the supervision of the Americans to prepare the islands for independence. A constitution was then framed and ratified, which established a presidential system under a unitary government with three co-equal branches of government, the executive, a bicameral legislature, and the judiciary.
2The Philippine Constitution of 1899 was called the Malolos Constitution because it was ratified by an assembly of Filipino delegates in Malolos, Bulacan, a province North of Manila.
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Development of Public Administration in the Philippines 335
The commonwealth government, however, went into exile when Japan invaded the Philippines during World War II.
With the end of World War II, the United States granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946. The political system and structure under the 1935 constitution was restored and the country continued to adopt a presidential form of government. The years following the granting of independence from the United States in 1946 were difficult periods of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and consolidation. The post-war era saw the Philippine economy at a standstill. Poverty was endemic and the widespread destruction of property and dislocation of businesses exacerbated the situation. Senator Millard Tydings of the U.S. Congress commented that the Philippine capital, Manila, was among the “the most completely devastated capital city in the world” next to Warsaw in Poland (Shalom, 1986: 33).
Following years of reconstruction and despite an insurgency movement in Northern Luzon, the post-war era in the Philippines saw a vibrant democracy marked by a two-party system. On July 4, 1946, Manuel Roxas was proclaimed president after an election held two months earlier. Roxas, however, died in office in 1948 and his vice-president, Elpidio Quirino, promptly assumed the presidency. Quirino was subsequently elected as president in 1950. However, Quirino was defeated in his run for re-election by his former secretary of national defense, the charismatic Ramon Magsaysay, who was credited as having broken the backbone of an insurgent Communist movement in Northern Luzon.
Magsaysay proved to be a popular and populist president who was loved by the masses. However, his term was cut short in 1957 when his plane crashed in the Visayas in the southern part of the islands. Again, Magsaysay’s vice-president, Carlos Garcia, assumed the presidency. Garcia was, however, defeated in his run for the presidency in 1961 by his vice-president, Disodado Macapagal, father of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who would assume the presidency in 2001. In the presidential elections of 1965, Macapagal in turn was defeated by Ferdinand Marcos, who would rule the Philippines for the next 20 years.
From 1946 to 1965, elections for presidential, congressional, and local government positions were held. The elections in the Philippines at both national and local level were not always harmonious or smooth. They were generally marred by charges of fraud, vote buying, intimidation, and vote shaving. Still, the Philippines emerged as among the vibrant democracies in Asia characterized by a strong two-party system.
Nevertheless, during this period, while its economy was able to recover slowly from the ruins of the war, poverty remained constant and agrarian unrest rekindled the insurrection movement led by Communist partisans that was supposed to have been checked in the early 1950s. In the southern part of the country, in Mindanao, an armed secessionist movement led by Muslim separatist leaders threatened to divide Philippine territory. Likewise, student alienation against the government and with President Marcos was expressed in continuing noisy protests and violent demonstrations in the streets. In this turmoil, Marcos saw the opportunity to perpetuate himself in power by way of declaring martial law, a power vested in him under the 1935 constitution.
In September 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos, barred under the constitution from seeking re-election as president after two terms, proclaimed martial law, abolished the legislature, adopted a new constitution, and ruled the country by decree. He also convened a Constitutional Convention to write a new constitution that would give legitimacy to his regime. In 1985, stung by criticisms that he no longer enjoyed the mandate to continue to rule as president, reinforced by pressure from the international community, he called for snap presidential elections. He was challenged by Corazon Aquino, the widow of his mortal enemy, Senator Benigno Aquino who was assassinated at Manila airport on his return to the Philippines after 3 years of exile in the United
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336 Public Administration in Southeast Asia
States. The snap presidential election was again marred by accusations of cheating, until Marcos was ousted in the celebrated people power revolution in February 1986 and Corazon Aquino was installed as president.
Democracy was restored under President Aquino following Marcos’ ouster. President Aquino subsequently proceeded to submit the adoption and ratification of a new constitution that was approved by the Filipino people in 1987. A second people power revolution, however, occurred again in 2001 when the populist president, Joseph Estrada, was forcibly ousted after a failed impeachment trial. Estrada was hounded by allegations and charges of involvement in jueteng, an illegal numbers game that started during the Spanish era and continues to be widespread in the country today.
Estrada’s vice-president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was installed under controversial circumstances in 2001 and was elected as president in 2004, also after another disputed and contested election marred by allegations of massive cheating and manipulation. Her term was also tainted by exposes of graft and corruption charges amounting to billions of pesos. President Arroyo’s stay in office was beset by a series of impeachment complaints against her, which were subsequently thrown out by her allies in Congress, who retained the majority.
The presidential system under a democratic framework established under the 1986 constitution remains in force today, although efforts have been made under the current president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, to change or amend it into a parliamentary form under a federal system. President Arroyo, like Marcos, has been accused of perpetuating herself in power by shifting to a parliamentary system because of term limits under the 1987 constitution.
Thus, in 2009, a resolution was unanimously passed calling for Congress to convene itself into a Constituent Assembly to amend the constitution. This was met by criticisms from various sectors who insisted that presidential elections, as mandated under the 1987 constitution, be held in 2010.
17.3 Pre-Colonial Era in the Philippines
The pre-colonial period in the Philippines has been described and documented in various respectable accounts that trace the origins, lives, and social organization of the early settlers and inhabitants of the islands.3 But as Corpuz points out, prior to the colonization by Spain in 1521, pre-colonial Philippines “rests in historical twilight” and documented in obscure works (Corpuz, 1957: 1).
The pre-historic Filipinos were an indigenous population characterized by waves of settlers and migrations between 25,000 and 30,000 BC, who came to the archipelago from mainland Southeast Asia in big boats (Tan, 1997: 33; Abueva, 1988: 22). From these settlers emerged patterns of ethnic lines that shaped strong cultural patterns and features. They ranged from the dark-skinned pygmies whose cultural remains are preserved in Negrito-type Filipinos, to those of Malay stock who came from the ancient Malaysians and Indonesians (Tan, 1997: 33).
The new inhabitants lived in scattered villages or communities called barangays, named after the boats or vessels that brought them to their area of settlement (Corpuz, 1957: 107).4 The baran-
3For those interested in the pre-colonial era and the early Filipinos, the accounts of Tan (1997), Corpuz (1989), and Agoncillo and Guerrero (1977), among others, may be useful references. Tan’s slim volume goes back a hundred million years to the evolution of the land.
4The word barangay is also described interchangeably by other authors as balangay or balanghai, which according to Veneracion (1988: 26), were the cognate to the Malay perahu berangai or piratical prahu, also known as perahu balang, a two-masted ship. The term barangay replaced the barrio to denote the basic unit of local government in the Philippines representing villages or communities that comprised a city or a municipality.
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gays consisted of 30–100 households with the family as the nucleus and largely based on kinship. These settlements were self-sufficient and generally self-contained, enjoying independence from each other because the early Filipinos did not have a centralized government (Abueva, 1988: 23; Corpuz, 1957: 2). According to one account, many of these villages or barangays existed within the same territories but were not subject to one another (Veneracion, 1988: 26).
Sultanates, or governing institutions under the rulership of Muslim leaders called sultans, however, were believed to have also been established in the southern part of the islands in Mindanao, particularly in Maguindanao, Lanao, and Sulu. As early as the fifteenth century, parts of the region had been somewhat consolidated under a sultan (Tan, 1997; Corpuz, 1989; Reyes, 2003). But these communities apparently had not laid down the foundations of an established bureaucracy, even if these cohesive communities were governed by internal rules and practices, suggesting some form of political and economic organization and relatively mature culture and institutions. Corpuz (1957: 107) suggests that the origins of local government in the Philippines are perhaps rooted in this kind of arrangement, with each unit headed by a village chieftain, called the dato or datu.
A system of division of functions and duties appeared to have evolved in the stratification of classes marked by a hierarchy of status. The nobility, where the dato and leaders come from, consisted of men of wealth, prestige, and power. The dato was chosen not only by virtue of blood or inheritance, but also by merit, or in terms of courage, leadership, and heroism in tribal battles with other communities. The brave warrior commanded recognition, respect, and admiration in order to be given the honor of becoming the chief of the village (Veneracion, 1988: 26–27; Abueva, 1988: 23).
A class of freemen, who enjoyed the rights and privileges of social mobility, comprised the largest sector in the communities and assumed the roles of warriors, artisans, artists, and other special professions. The last level, the serfs and slaves, performed forced labor and were considered properties that could be sold or exchanged. These were usually captives in tribal wars or those born into slave families (Tan, 1997: 45; Abueva, 1988: 23).
As village head, the dato was the acknowledged paternal and political leader, who exercised almost unlimited power and dispensed and supervised the administration of justice, the use of communal lands, the delivery of basic services, the arbitration of conflicts, and collected tributes. The defense of the settlement against territorial encroachments by other communities and other conflicts was also a major function (De la Torre, 1986: 6).
Supported by a council of elders, a legal system embodied laws that defined aspects of private and public ownership of property, inheritance, marriage, rights and obligations, and many components of individual and institutional behavior (Abueva, 1988: 24). The enforcement of these laws and rules are now generally associated with the duties of modern bureaucracies.
Out of these practices evolved traditions and practices that somehow extended to the colonial and modern eras despite the compelling influences of colonial rule. These traditions may have been assimilated into modern Philippine bureaucracy and made to adapt to the explicit formalizations of the Western model. Traces of these administrative practices remain embedded in the Filipino culture and have an impact on the administrative system today.
Specifically, the nuclear family and its extended kinship were the basic units of social organization that continue today. The strong kinship and patrimonial systems that were shaped in the pre-colonial times persist in Philippine bureaucracy today, and can be understood in terms of the practice of officials and politicians alike who are disposed to provide special favors or preferential treatment to relatives and friends. The strong familial tradition of closely knit relationships and kinship that tend to provide undue and sometimes illegal favor for relatives persists in the present political and administrative system in the Philippines. Appointments of relatives to executive and bureaucratic positions by
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