The Philippines' political system is that of a presidential, representative, and democratic republic with a multi-party system. Head of government, head of state, and commander in chief of the armed forces is the president.
The course provides an introduction to concepts used in the study of political actors, structures, processes, and outcomes. The course ultimately provides students with the tools to study and critique the Philippine state, its constitution, governance, cultures, and realities.
The Philippines is a republic with a presidential form of government wherein power is equally divided among its three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. The government seeks to act in the best interests of its citizens through this system of check and balance.
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Everyday politics in the Philippines usually arouse scant interest in the United States. This changed markedly, however, with the near contemporaneous 2016 elections first of Rodrigo Duterte as president of the Philippines and then of Donald Trump as president of the United States. The similarities between the two candidates were hard to mistake. Both were self-consciously anti-establishment, they regularly insulted their political opponents and consistently violated norms of political correctness, and they styled themselves as law-and-order politicians, promising vigorous and even violent crackdowns on criminal activity.
Yet when it comes to political polarization—in the sense of politics and society being rigidly divided into two blocs along a single master cleavage—the similarity ends. In the United States, polarization between Republicans and Democrats likely was significant in bringing about Trump’s electoral victory. Moreover, polarization in the United States has, if anything, increased since the 2016 election. In contrast, in the Philippines, where political parties are almost nonexistent, there was no evidence of polarization at the time of Duterte’s electoral victory. He emerged as the most popular of a diverse group of more or less independent presidential candidates. Since then, despite his government’s notoriously lethal campaign against drug dealers and users, mass polarization remains all but absent.
