does the philippines government prohibit you from participating in the political process.
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the Philippines, re-democratization has seen the emergence of new modes of political participation for extra-parliamentary oppositions that are variously aligned with the poor. These involve collective representation within the state and multilateral organizations, or societal incorporation. Among extra-parliamentary oppositions, the urban poor, as a political movement of squatters, has experienced societal incorporation through new laws and programmes that enable access to formal land tenure through market inclusion. In this way, their political participation is limited to proximate representation by non-governmental organisations in the implementation of programmes and projects. But the urban poor are also known for their ‘disallowed’ participation as voters in electoral contests. The disappointing outcomes from societal incorporation have forced the urban poor to persist with this civil society expression of their activism. This article explains the class logic to the urban poor's ‘disallowed’ political participation under prevailing neo-liberal conditions.
Keywords: urban poorPhilippinesrepresentationpolitical participationpopulism
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Introduction
The restoration of democracy in the Philippines has seen the emergence of new modes of political participation that can be identified as examples of societal incorporation, for extra-parliamentary oppositions. At national and, especially, local government levels, this societal incorporation includes consultative mechanisms, allocated spaces for ‘marginal sector’ representation and programme and project partnering.1 While expanding the sites for collective engagement with the state, as constituted, these modes of participation offer few spaces for contestation over social and political alternatives within democratic frameworks. This is because they either lock in minority representation or limit political engagement to efforts to improve the state's responsiveness to legitimate demands. The significance of the former is that it cannot easily lead to majority, parliamentary representation; the significance of the latter is that it bypasses the democratic representation of interest contestation in favour of a partnership model of political accountability aimed at ‘dense cooperation between public authorities and civil society’.2 At the heart of the second of these is the difference between representation as advocacy and representation as proximity to clients.
The new modes of political participation are a form of societal incorporation because they are a creation of the state and/or of multilateral organizations. Yet, to the extent that they do invite participation from extra-parliamentary oppositions, a number have become sites of contestation over the form of that participation and its associated representation.3 Thus, although established by constitutional, legislative and/or administrative provisions, these new modes of participation often operate, in practice, at the intersection between civil society expressions of engagement and societal incorporation by extra-parliamentary oppositions in the Philippines. This restricts the state's capacity to manage and contain political participation through societal incorporation; nevertheless, this article argues that societal incorporation has had an important, limiting effect on the discourses and practices of these extra-parliamentary oppositions since the era of President Ferdinand Marcos that came to an end in 1986.
The extra-parliamentary oppositions under review here are those variously aligned with the poor and marginalized in society. Among these, Manila's urban poor form a distinctive movement on account of their own, ‘disallowed’ civil society expressions of political participation to obtain land for housing and related services. This participation is ‘disallowed’ because its demands are not sanctioned by the regime, in large measure because the urban poor themselves are regarded to be unworthy of recognition and consideration by the state. The urban poor are constituted politically as informal settlers or squatters. Without sanctioned access to legal tenure, in a formal democracy, their collective political engagements are typically restricted to the openings that others create by having an interest in power. These openings do not give the urban poor access to state resources and protection as a ‘justiciable right’, but they do offer them some space to bargain for these as a matter of ‘political expediency’.4 To the extent that such openings are generally linked to the timing of elections and/or other pressures on state legitimacy, they are also ‘temporal and contextual’ in character.5 As will be shown, the resultant intrusion of the personal, political interests of politicians into the arena of public policy has led to the urban poor's ‘disallowed’ engagements with the state being closely associated with the particularism of informal institutions