CSEAS Colloquium 2024

WHICH LINEAGES?
History and Interpretations of Philippine Politics

NoReservation
required

February 22 (Thu) 13:30-15:00
1st Floor, Research Commons, East Building, CSEAS

Political scientists studying Philippine politics have generally been less averse
to invoking the past in analyses of contemporary politics than many of theircounterparts focused on the U.S. or Europe who have often favoredahistorical, behavioralist accounts. One approach has looked to history to
identify culturalist continuity. Agpalo’s historically-derived pangulo strongman
paradigm is perhaps the most famous example, with several recent
explanations of widespread attitudinal illiberalism in the Philippines attesting
to its continuing influence. Another group of scholars have taken what could
be termed a kind of reverse Whiggish interpretation of history by tracing
current pathologies of Philippine politics (e.g., “caciquism” or “bossism”) backto the US and Spanish colonial periods, with a study of the autocratic legacyof “colonial constitutionalism” a recent example. A third possibility - based on
skepticism of culturalism as potentially essentialist and path dependence as
overly determinist - is to emphasize the cyclical nature of the country’spolitics. The remainder of the presentation will explore what such aninterpretation might look like. It will point to how over nearly a century
aggrandizing presidents have alternated with elite-led “democratic crusades”.
Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s landslide victory in the 2022 presidential election witha campaign invoking nostalgia for his father’s authoritarian rule can be viewed
as part of this cycling as a counter-narrative of a developmental “golden age”
after Marcos, Sr. declared martial law in 1972 rule eclipsed the tale of how
EDSA “people power” uprising in 1986 “miraculously” freed Filipinos fromdictatorship.

Mark R. Thompson
Visiting Research ScholarMark R. Thompson is currently a CSEAS visiting research fellow and chairprofessor of political science in the Department of Public and International
Affairs as well as director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre at the City
University of Hong Kong. His books include The Philippines: From “PeoplePower” to Democratic Backsliding (Cambridge, 2023), Presidentialism andDemocracy in Southeast and East Asia (co-editor, Routledge, 2023),
China’s “Singapore Model” and Authoritarian Learning (co-editor,Routledge, 2020), Authoritarian Modernism in East Asia (Palgrave, 2019),
Routledge Handbook of the Contemporary Philippines (co-editor, 2018),
Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2004) andThe Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalist Rule and Democratic Transition inthe Philippines (Yale, 1995). A past president of the Hong Kong Political
Science Association and the Asian Political and International Studies
Association, he was Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow for Southeast
Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (2008) and Stanford
University (2009). He received a BA in religious studies from Brown
University, a MA in social and political sciences from Cambridge University,and a PhD in political science with distinction from Yale University where hewas mentored by Juan J. Linz and James C. Scott.