activities in the US state legislatures, where 80% of the bills dealt with state-wide (in 1997), as opposed to district-specific issues, even though local constituency services are considered hallmarks of legislators’ activities in the United States, where the term “pork barrel” politics was originally coined.<sup>24</sup> An implication is that the Philippine Congress as a whole is less likely to take up a matter such as decentralization from a broad national perspective than from a parochial local perspective. If so, any legislative change, if it were to prosper against the collective action problem highlighted here, is more likely than not to take the form of aggregation of certain parochial matters (e.g., tax exemptions in specific localities as in the case of the entertainment tax exemptions mentioned above) that do not create zero-sum conflict among the LGUs.

In Mexico the Executive has the option of submitting a bill directly, in addition to having its ruling party propose one. In contrast, the Philippine Constitution does not allow the government to submit bills for legislative considerations other than a budget proposal. This, in theory, limits the president’s agendasetting power. In practice, when the executive wishes to present a legislative proposal of its own high priority, it can do so via a member of the House sympathetic to the administration and certify specific bills as priority bills. Available data indicate that president’s priority bills have unusually high enactment rates. The enactment rates of the priority bills in the Philippines are higher than that in Mexico under a fully democratic period (2000-06). This suggests that the Philippine president could exercise a reasonable level of leverage vis-à-vis legislators to have priority bills passed, perhaps by signaling the importance of certain bills and thus allowing individual legislators to overcome their collective action problem. This data, however, should still be taken with caution.

**Table 10:  Enactment Rates of President’s Bills at the House of Representatives**

|Congress/Administration|President’s PriorityBills|President’s PriorityBills Enacted|Enactment Rate|
|---|---|---|---|
|8th/Aquino|93|54|58.1%|
|12th/Arroyo|20|8|40.0%|

Source: Kawanaka (2010) First, higher enactment rates may come at a price. The frequently made assertion about the politics of legislative process in the Philippines is that the president needs to “pay off” individual legislators to mobilize their votes in favor of his/her priority bills because of the absence of party discipline (Kasuya 2008, Kawanaka 2010). For that reason it is necessary for him/her to be selective of which bills to push. A related concern often voiced by both observers and some political actors, though, is that the process of negotiating legislators’ support sometimes entails not only side payments (e.g., preferential releases of the “pork barrel” budget) but also some substantive compromise in the content of the bill itself. On matters related to decentralization, some are weary that pushing for a technically sound bill, say, to reform the IRA distribution formula, might end up being altered into something far less acceptable in the end.

> 24 The data on the US state bills is from G. Gamm and T. Kousser (2010) “Broad Bills or Particularistic Policy? Historical Patterns in American State Legislatures,” _American Political Science Review_ Vol. 104, No. 1, pp. 151-170.

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