Leadership and Political Stabilization in a Post-Aquino Philippines

This paper inquires into the nature of political stability as a basic challenge to Philippine political authorities. Its main thesis is the centrality of political leadership in addressing this concern. The political leadership succeeds in initiating and sustaining political stability to the extent that it is able to engage other groups in coalition work, to strengthen the state and its political institutions, and to effect basic political reforms which increase the overall capacity of government for governance. The main analytical frame employed in this study calls for understanding the presence of a weak state in a society where strong, well-organized social forces operate to penetrate the state and expropriate its governmental and other political institutions for vested-interest use. The political leadership, operationalized as being mainly the President and his administration, must contain the aggressiveness of these largely oligarchic groups, and harness all available resources towards the modernization and democratization of the state. The paper has three main parts. The first looks briefly into the analytically separate concepts of stability and leadership and their mutual relationship as discussed in the professional literature. The second part explores the specific Philippine context within which these two political concepts and their operational realities must be further understood. The last part explicitly considers the most urgent tasks of the present administration as it attempts to politically stabilize the Philippines and build a modern democratic state.