Separate but not coequal:Executive legislative dynamics and lawmaking in the Philippine congress

If legislation can be any gauge of success in setting the agenda, how does the Philippine president fare in terms of translating programs into policies before Congress?

The classic view of chief executives in many presidential democracies is that of a dominant policy actor who exercises not only gate keeping but agenda setting powers. In the Philippines, by constitutional design the president does not possess formal legislative powers and is limited by checks imposed by co-equal branches such as a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. I argue, however, that despite the lack of formal legislative powers the Philippine president dominates policymaking through the timely and strategic exercise of residual and informal powers such as the prerogative to endorse priority government legislative proposals.

To test the patterns of executive-legislative dynamics and the effect of executive-congress relations on lawmaking, a common methodological approach employed in the literature is to statistically estimate ideal points using interest group scores or roll call data.

The analysis of roll call has a long history in legislative studies even before Poole and Rosenthal’s groundbreaking work (1997) and the succeeding body of research applying roll call data became the litmus test of later scholarships (Cherryholmes and Shapiro 1969; Clausen 1973; Matthews and Stimson 1975; Weisberg 1978). In the US where roll call data is extensively used, a considerable amount of effort is poured to collect data to estimate the preferences of Congress members in various periods, and to extend its application to other policy actors in other settings (Poole 2005). The press typically report roll call votes of members of the US Congress far more often than they do of other Congressional data. This presupposes however that roll call data are readily available and that there is a formal system of recording and safekeeping this data as part of public information. In many nascent democracies, however, roll call data are generally meager, if not conspicuously missing in periods of transition, tumultuous regimes or instability.

In democratic systems where legislatures tend to vote unanimously, or where access to roll call data can be challenging, however, how does one attempt to frame the effect of, say, presidential agenda on lawmaking? In the Philippines, the president has neither formal legislative power nor the prerogative to initiate the crafting of laws. However when the president signifies to the urgency of a certain measure, not only does the measure become exempt from certain constitutional requirement that delay its passage but the certification itself is taken as a cue for immediate legislative attention. Yet in the Philippines roll call votes show little disparity and legislators just tend to vote similarly on the issues that are subject of their legislative activities (Kasuya 2008; Shin 2010). Does this mean there is hardly a variation in the ideal points of the entire members of Congress and that they all share the same set of policy preferences?

These, along with the questions raised at the beginning, are the puzzles that impelled the pursuit of this research and to whose answers I seek to contribute.

By examining the bills that have been filed and approved at the House of Representatives between 1987 and 2010, this study looks at the interplay of resources

available to the executive and congress as separate branches in the Philippines and how such relationship have influenced lawmaking. By lawmaking, I mean the constitutional exercise of the legislative branch of its power to craft laws. The dataset covers 6,130 bills, spans seven Congresses, in four presidential administrations, beginning with the first Congress of the post-Marcos democracy (8th Congress under the presidency of the late Corazon Aquino). It seeks to determine not just the extent to which presidential agenda—the broad set of measures certified as priority by the president—is enacted into legislation, but the factors and circumstances that increase or lessen the propensity of these measures toward bicameral success.