The current collection of papers deal with the question of how ongoing changes in popular attitudes and systemic shifts complicate political participation. While the papers in this panel mostly deal with two countries (the Philippines and Japan), the phenomenon and methodological considerations employed seek to offer opportunities for replication and comparison across democratic polities within Asia. The papers also take into consideration the increasing precarity of contemporary democratic spaces--as facilitated by "post-truth" contexts, diminishing trust in institutions and the ironic drive of longstanding political forces towards greater institutionalization. Ultimately, the projects share the objective of a) portraying the increasing complexity of political participation; b) emphasizing uneven privileges within government and civil society; and c) the need to reassess how political resistance and solidarity can be made possible.
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Unsuccessful technocratic inputs in policy-making: The case of the passage of the free public higher education bill in the Philippines
Nelson C. Cainghog
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines - Diliman
Several think tanks, independent experts, government technocrats, and non-government organizations were not supportive of free public higher education proposals in the Philippines. They reasoned that this will disproportionately benefit the non-poor; the poor being a small minority in higher education. Backed by empirical studies, they were unsuccessful in convincing the legislators and the president who eventually passed the bill and implemented the law. This paper examines how expert knowledge was interpreted and incorporated into the discourse in the congressional committees and in media and how proponents of free public higher education selectively incorporated expert knowledge in advocating for free public higher education. This paper offers lessons to advocates and experts on how to effectively advocate their positions in government policy making especially in a developing country context like the Philippines.
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We Will Not Be Sidelined”: Philippine Civil Society Organizations’ Operational Shifts During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Hansley A. Juliano
Department of Political Science
Ateneo de Manila University
In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the operations of civil society organizations CSOs in the Philippines? To what extent are these issues a) caused explicitly by the pandemic or b) already longstanding even before the current crises? The current presentation is an exploratory attempt at analyzing the internal management of civil society/non-government organizations, and how these helped in fostering organizations' resilience or contributed to their difficulty adapting. Interviews were conducted with specific organizations (social movements, advocacy organizations, and meta-organizations). I demonstrate that all types of organizations were experiencing organizational issues even before the pandemic—mostly in seeking additional non-state and public support. These coincided with the dramatic shift in civil society-government relations under the Aquino and Duterte administrations. Instead of assuming that the type, ideologies or motivations of the organization will cause ease or difficulty in its operational shifts, the loss of either political space, funding or supporters need not be wholly debilitating for CSOs: the intensity and conditions they are left behind in will determine whether they can survive a crisis or not. These can point to larger resiliency issues CSOs face in the Philippines and worldwide - especially as the “new normal” in the Philippines proceeds under the second Marcos administration.
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Unraveling the Threads: Exploring Sociopolitical Behavior Amidst Emerging Conspiracy Theories during COVID-19
Zen Raphael Seltman
Graduate School of International Development
Nagoya University
During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous new conspiracy theories emerged, spreading alongside the virus itself. These narratives suggested various conspirators acting with malicious intent, such as governments exaggerating the dangers of the coronavirus to enforce control or pharmaceutical companies manufacturing unsafe and ineffective vaccines for profit. Despite Japan's high vaccination rates and widespread masking practices, conspiracy theories still found traction, underscoring their enduring appeal. While recent events demonstrated how belief in conspiracy theories can lead to violence and civil unrest, most adherents do not engage in such overt actions. Through in-depth interviews with Japanese adherents supplemented by existing research, this study aims to create an analytical framework that can give us a deeper understanding of the sociopolitical behavioral landscape of the conspiracy theory adherent demographic. The resulting framework will provide contextualized insights for policymakers and scholars in Japan and abroad trying to understand citizen behaviors. This study will add to the burgeoning body of work that explores an often misunderstood and pathologized phenomenon.
Combating Caciques, Plunders, and a Killer: Philippines' Civil Society after the People Power Revolution and Its Future
Eishi Senaha
Graduate School of Asian and African Studies
Kyoto University
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It's been 36 years since Benedict Anderson diagnosed the post-People Power Revolution Philippines' democracy as the local traditional elite-led democracy, "Cacique democracy"(Anderson 1988). Civil society accepted this idea and has continued the fight against caciques with advocacies, social movements, and arts until now. However, this fight met several challenges: the fatigue of fighting the caciques and its lesser evilness compared to Duterte, who's done a bloody drug war and killed more than thirty thousand civilians without judicial process. Philippines civil society is losing its way by entering a new age but how can this be overcome? Assessing the fight against cacique democracy by looking at a massive social movement by civil society: Million People March. This paper insists on the importance of the "petite bourgeoisie "(Scott 2012) in the history of the Philippines' civil society and urge to reconsider looking down on them by evaluating their contributions.
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