The party-list disaster

Someday, when it finally becomes possible to amend the 1987 Constitution without the narrow considerations of personal and partisan interest, like term extensions, perhaps the people who get to do the amending will take a long, hard look at the party-list system. Far from being a means of guaranteeing “proportional representation” to marginalized sectors in Congress, the current system has now become a parody of itself, with everyone claiming to represent the unrepresented, scrambling to be on top of the ballot and protesting the arcane rules on seat allocation.

Perhaps the time has come to rethink the idea of allocating congressional seats for supposedly marginalized sectors altogether. This is because, apart from the aboveground leftist parties that have dominated party-list elections in the past, no other sectors have been consistently represented by the system since its inception in the Constitution and the approval of the law enabling its use.

The track record of party-list congressmen in the House is also questionable, with most representatives having little to show by way of legislation or any other yardstick by which congressional performance is measured. And with the law directing that fully 20 percent of the Lower House must eventually be made up by party-list congressmen, perhaps its time we demand some return on our investment in these lawmakers.

It’s bad enough that regular congressmen who represent actual geographical districts are mostly non-performing, as well. But when you add the cost of maintaining up to 55 other lawmakers who come from the party-list ranks and who have distinguished themselves even less, perhaps a rethinking of the system is in order.

Because the law on party-list representation prohibits these congressmen from having a share in the Countrywide Development Fund (also known as “pork barrel”), they do not even have the political clout to pass laws of local application that require the smallest amount of funding, like a stretch of rural farm-to-market road or a barangay health center. When they do author bills of national significance, they often have to enlist the help of regular congressmen who have powerful connections to Malacañang, or risk seeing these die in the congressional mill.

Right now, most party-listers are often involved in the legislative process only as co-authors of draft laws that do make it through the wringer, or as warm-body votes that can help push legislation that is being lobbied by the district representatives. In many instances, party-listers are often considered second-class congressmen or even as “saling pusa in the legislative process.

In the meantime (again, with the exception of the leftist party-listers), the public at large often doesn’t even know that the party-list system exists and that it will make the ballot in the elections in May longer by more than 150 choices. As the latest Pulse Asia survey found, fully seven out of 10 Filipinos are unaware of the very existence of party-list congressmen and that they pay for the upkeep of these lawmakers.

And far from allowing marginalized sectors a foothold in the legislative process, as the framers of the Constitution thought when they appended the party-list system to Congress, there now seems to be no limit to the number of sectors that can claim to be represented and which demand to be on the ballot and in the House. The all-too-obvious attempt a few months back to accredit cockfighters as a party-list group may be laughable, but the list of sectors claiming to require congressional representation now goes way beyond the agricultural and labor groups, the youth, women, urban poor and other clearly marginalized members of society.

Worse, the party-list bloc in Congress is also chock-full of groups that are actually surrogates for regular political parties and powerful special-interest lobbies, politically privileged sectors that led to the development in Europe of the party-list system in the first place. And that’s just the groups that make it past the elections—on the ballot, a lot more of these pseudo-underprivileged groups probably outnumber the legitimate ones two to one.

Religious groups, which were expressly prohibited by the law from being converted into party-list organizations, are staples on the party-list ballot and in Congress as party-list representatives. The military, the landed gentry, industry groups disguised as anything from peasants’ organizations to labor unions and even the media all seek the single party-list vote on every ballot, even if none of them can rightly be called underprivileged.

The Commission on Elections, which is supposed to weed out the illegitimate groups, seems content with merely taking out the obviously unqualified like the “sabungeros” or, as in the case of the pro-homosexual group Ang Ladlad, using its commissioners’ individual biases to keep out controversial organizations.

(The case of Ladlad is important because, like the other, more patently unqualified groups, it seeks to use the underprivileged status of the few to justify the representation of everyone. The fallacy of entire groups of people being worthy of party-list representation simply because some of them are underprivileged is one of the reasons why it can be convincingly argued that the system has failed.

For instance, does the accreditation of the regional party-list An Waray signify that all Eastern Visayans are underprivileged or that only some of them are? And speaking of An Waray, if they are a regional grouping, aren’t they already represented by their own regular congressmen without giving them more representation through the party-list system?)

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Then there’s the truly hilarious way that the party-list groups that do qualify attempt to make it to the top of the list by using acronyms that start with “A,” the first letter of the alphabet, or multiples of that letter. Thus, Aba is trumped by Aahon, on the theory that the voters will only look at the top of the list which contains more than a hundred groups vying to be noticed.

This telephone-directory system that puts a premium on topmost placement has reached its height (or its lowest point, if you prefer) with the use of numbers in the front of a party-list’s name, like 1-Utak. How will the theory of proportional representation be upheld if the party-list groups all want to be on top of the list, regardless of the sector that they seek to represent?

Finally, after the elections, there’s always the problem of congressional seat allocation for the winners who achieve the required two-percent minimum of all the votes cast. Despite the best efforts of Comelec and even the Supreme Court to apportion the available seats to those who make the cut, the system is still as difficult to comprehend as ever.

The last ruling of the high court on the matter laid out the so-called “Carpio formula” for divvying up the party-list seats, a method that is not without its incomprehensible—and even outright contradictory—provisions. The four supposedly inviolable parameters of the formula are the 20 percent allocation of the total Congress seats to party-listers, the two-percent minimum votes that any winning party-list must achieve, the three-seat limit given to winning groups and proportional representation, which means that any additional seats will have to be given in proportion to the winners’ total number of votes.

It took an Ateneo mathematics professor, Felix Murga, to point out last year the problematic nature of this supposedly cure-all formula. This is because “the four inviolable parameters of the Philippine-style party-list system are inconsistent with each other” and “any seat allocation formula that will adopt these parameters is bound to such inconsistency by upholding one or two parameters and compromising the others,” Murga wrote in a paper.

“The error in the first inviolable parameter can easily be corrected by using the correct number of

congressional districts,” Murga noted. “However, the 20 percent constitutional mandate cannot be filled up if the three-seat cap is imposed. Thus, the two-percent qualifying threshold is compromised in the second round of the Carpio formula. Parties with more than six percent of the total votes are penalized if they get more than three seats by the Carpio Formula. The effect is denying these parties of the seats that are rightfully theirs. Hence, the three-seat cap violates the democratic of proportional representation which is one of the principles of social justice. With the imposition of the three-seat cap in our Party-list proportional representation voting system, the State

does not promote social justice but instead negates its development. Therefore, any seat allocation formula that imposes a seat-capping mechanism on the Party-list proportional representation voting system contradicts the social justice provision of the 1987 Constitution.”

In other words, the system is contradictory, inconsistent and unjust. And that’s just from a purely mathematical seat-allocation point of view.

The party-list system has been with us since 1998, the first elections for sectoral representatives after the passage of the law enabling the implementation of the well-intentioned provision of the 1987 Constitution. Perhaps it’s time we admitted that the whole scheme is a failure—and scrapped this whole farce of giving power to the powerless. –Jojo Robles, Manila Standard Today