[Philippine corruption] Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines The Political Economy of Authoritarianism #3/163

If the costs of mobilizing a group to action to produce a common good are greater to the ones who mobilize the group than the benefits that will result, the individuals will not mobilize the group, and the group will not form. No one will then act, and all will be worse off.' Group formation and action are also affected by access to information. Before a group can act, it must understand the forces that affect its goals. In the case of political interest groups, the government is the primary "force" that needs to be understood. Before a group will act, it must be apparent to that group what the effect of a government policy will be and how it will affect the group. Information is never perfect, and government seems always to want to obscure the effects of policy when it will adversely affect a given group. One of the costs involved in group activity, then, is obtaining information and overcoming the attempts at disinformation by the government or by other groups. Those groups that do obtain information for themselves then try to conceal information from potential rivals. Groups who do not act together are unable or unwilling to bear the cost of getting information.

A second key element in applying an economic analysis to the Philippines is that politicians and constituents can be viewed as sellers and buyers in a market. The politicians are selling goods and services from public resources. In exchange, they look for votes or other forms of support from constituents. The link between constituent support on the one hand and governmental services on the other is indirect. The constituents, in effect, "buy" the supplier (politician) rather than the goods themselves. Politicians, in turn, have to provide a selection of goods and services without the benefit of direct feedback, which will satisfy their constituents and thus enable the politicians to remain in power. The lack of direct feedback leads politicians to provide services that offer the greatest likelihood of winning support.

One way to win this support is by providing services characterized by a clear benefit to a small group while, at the same time, characterized by unclear costs to society as a whole. The small group will try to support the politician who provides it services because the benefit of those services is clear. The general public pays but may not even be aware that it is paying. However, the cost is likely to be small enough that even if constituents knew they were paying, they would not try to change the situation anyway. The result is that the politician has a small but dedicated group on his side, with no one opposed. The group also will likely make donations to the politician so that he in turn can use media and other services to seek further support.

Votes have usually been seen as the medium of exchange in the political marketplace in Western-style democracies. Although the Philippines has democratic structures and procedures-including elections-ethnic and feudal relationships play the dominant role in determining political power. To govern effectively, the ruler of the Philippines needs the support of key families. Those families are landowners who have extensive control over those areas of the country where their plantations and businesses are located. Local government officials usually owe their positions to the influence of the local family, so they are reluctant to oppose them. The leader of the Philippines, then, must be able to adopt policies that favor the ruling elites. Marcos sustained himself through elections for thirteen years because he satisfied the demands of key power groups. In keeping with the second principle mentioned above, Marcos satisfied the demands of a relatively small group of people using the resources of the Philippines as a whole so the small groups benefited while most citizens saw their wages lessen and the infrastructure of the nation slowly deteriorate. In keeping with the first principle mentioned above, most citizens, even though they may have been aware of the gradual decline in his living standard, were unable to offer any resistance because they were unable to sustain the cost necessary to depose Marcos. They could not sustain the cost because they lacked the economic resources to publicize their cause in spite of media distortion. Marcos finally used repressive force to make protesters pay the ultimate price. The costs of resistance outweighed the benefits. The average citizen also was unwilling to bear the cost of resistance because the political power of the elites ensured that those outside the elites had no real chance to gain power. Resistance could then have likely resulted only in one elite dictator replacing another.

A group can be expected to resist a dictator only when it has the chance to usurp his position. The communists were an exception, being members of a nonelite group willing to put up resistance. The nature of the communist revolution and ideology is such that the rebels saw themselves as replacing the dictator. They fought not to change the system but to establish a new system. For the communists, then, the ultimate gain was perceived to be greater than the immediate costs.

In the Philippines, it was finally an elite group who overthrew Marcos. Corazon Aquino was supported by members of powerful families who believed that the Philippine economy in the 1980s was destroying their wealth. They could no longer support Marcos and sought to usurp his power so that they could retain their profitable positions.

Various theories and models may be used to understand human behavior. I have chosen those of history and economics in order to understand the politics of the Philippines. Although we try to he objective or descriptive about our subject, the line between prescription and description is fuzzy. This is not so much that we are unable to distinguish between what is and what ought to be. It is that our descriptive theories hold prescriptive consequences. According to its simplifications, human behavior is described as self-interested and wealth-maximizing. I am afraid that one prescriptive result of this point of view is that to behave out of other than crass self interest is "irrational" and opens one up to exploitation by others. I do not believe that the pursuit of the ideals of justice or equality is pointless unless undergirded by economic self-interest. Economics and political science describe how we do, in fact, behave. We are not constrained to behave this way.

NOTES

1. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., 1963), p. 28.

2. Ferdinand E. Marcos, The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall International, 1979), pp. 263-264.

3. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).