"Wurfel presents a full examination of the island republic from independence to the present, placed in the context of the Philippines' long and rich history. . . . [He] has taken advantage of new research and publications, and has devoted more than a third of the study to the Marcos and Aquino administrations. . . . This is an important book--a study no student of Philippine politics and society can ignore."--Choice

Philippine political history, especially in the twentieth century, challenges the image of democratic evolution as serving the people, and does so in ways that reveal inadequately explored aspects of many democracies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century the Philippines has nonetheless shown gradual socioeconomic "progress". This book provides an interpretive overview of Philippine politics, and takes full account of the importance of patriotic Philippine factors in making decisions about future political policies. It analyses whether regional and local politics have more importance than national politics in the Philippines. Discussing cultural traditions of patronism, it also examines how clan feuds localize the state and create strong local policies. These conflicts in turn make regional and family-run polities collectively stronger than the central state institution. The book goes on to explore elections in the Philippines, and in particular the ways in which politicians win democratic elections, the institutionalized role of public money in this process, and the role that media plays. Offering a new interpretive overview of Philippine progress over many decades, the author notes recent economic and political changes during the current century while also trying to advance ideas that might prove useful to Filipinos. Presenting an in-depth analysis of the problems and possibilities of politics and society in the Philippines, the book will be of interest to those researching Southeast Asian Politics, Political History and Asian Society and Culture.

“The people” famously ousted Ferdinand Marcos from power in the Philippines in 1986. After democratization, though, a fault line appeared that split the people into citizens and the masses. The former were members of the middle class who engaged in civic action against the restored elite-dominated democracy, and viewed themselves as moral citizens in contrast with the masses, who were poor, engaged in illicit activities and backed flawed leaders. The masses supported emerging populist counter-elites who promised to combat inequality, and saw themselves as morally upright in contrast to the arrogant and oppressive actions of the wealthy in arrogating resources to themselves. In 2001, the middle class toppled the populist president Joseph Estrada through an extra-constitutional movement that the masses denounced as illegitimate. Fearing a populist uprising, the middle class supported action against informal settlements and street vendors, and violent clashes erupted between state forces and the poor. Although solidarity of the people re-emerged in opposition to the corrupt presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and propelled Benigno Aquino III to victory in 2010, inequality and elite rule continue to bedevil Philippine society. Each group considers the other as a threat to democracy, and the prevailing moral antagonism makes it difficult to overcome structural causes of inequality.

A detailed investigation of the contemporary Philippine Left, focusing on the political challenges and dilemmas that confronted activists following the disintegration of the Marcos regime and the reestablishment of electoral democracy under Corazon Aquino. The authors focus on such varied topics as peasant politics, urban social movements, purges and executions, and Marxist theory.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their co

This work addresses key topics which should be of interest to the academic and non-academic reader, such as the national level electoral politics, economic growth, the Philippine Chinese, law and order, opposition, the Left, and local and ethnic politics.

Focusing on a rice farming village in central Luzon, Kerkvliet argues that the faction and patron-client relationships dealt with by conventional studies are only one part of Philippine political life.

When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics explores the notoriously brutal Philippine war on drugs from below. Steffen Bo Jensen and Karl Hapal examine how the war on drugs folded itself into communal and intimate spheres in one Manila neighborhood, Bagong Silang. Police killings have been regular occurrences since the birth of Bagong Silang. Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics shows that although the drug war was introduced from the outside, it fit into and perpetuated already existing gendered and generational structures. In Bagong Silang, the war on drugs implicated local structures of authority, including a justice system that had always been deeply integrated into communal relations. The ways in which the war on drugs transformed these intimate relations between the state and its citizens, and between neighbors, may turn out to be the most lasting impact of Duterte's infamously violent policies.