country’s political system, or some extraordinary exogenous shock (e.g., major fiscal crisis), which we had earlier concluded was absent in today’s Philippines.

_Weak institutional capacity for collective legislative action_ The Philippine Congress is known for its particularly fragmented institutional structure and its members’ particularistic tendencies.<sup>22</sup> The absence of disciplined political parties capable of mobilizing and organizing votes of individual members means that the transaction cost of orchestrating a major legislative initiative is significantly high. It follows that even when a substantial number of legislators, including those in senior leadership positions, are in favor of a particular bill, regardless of its content, the probability that it will pass as a law through the legislative process is low.<sup>23</sup> This observation holds for any type of legislation whether it is related to decentralization or not. It is also a crude argument because it is obviously untrue that no legislation is ever passed and enacted in the Philippines. Nonetheless the available data does demonstrate that the probability that a bill becomes a law in the Philippines is unusually low. An examination of legislative records shows very low rates of bill enactment – on average, only around 3% of the bills introduced to the House are ever enacted into laws (Table 8). Even in comparison to these low enactment rates, the fate of the bills related to decentralization has been even worse. The enactment rate of the Senate bills on decentralization for the period 1987-2010 is 1.7% (5 out of 302) and that of the House bills is 0.6% (3 out of 465).

**Table 8:  Bill Enactment Rates at the House of Representatives, 1987-2004**

|Congress/Administration<br>|National application<br>(Passed/Introduced)|Enactment<br>rate|Local application<br>(Passed/Introduced)|Enactment<br>rate|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|8<sup>th</sup>/Aquino(1987-92)<br>|191/5,237|3.6%|809/30,183|2.7%|
|9<sup>th</sup>/Ramos(1993-95)<br>|156/3,184|4.9%|306/11,448|2.7%|
|10<sup>th</sup>/Ramos(1996-98)<br>|147/3,785|3.9%|393/6,766|5.8%|
|11<sup>th</sup>/Estrada(1998-2001)<br>|67/4,197|1.6%|348/8,738|4.9%|
|12<sup>th</sup>/Arroyo(2001-04)|89/2,920|3.0%|84/3,764|2.2%|
|Total|650/19,323|3.4%|1,940/60,899|3.2%|

Source: Kawanaka (2010) For comparison, legislative data for Mexico for 1991-97 show how a government run by a disciplined single party can produce results in stark contrast to the Philippines’ “low legislative productivity.” While the legislative “productivity” in Mexico declined in 1997 when the ruling party lost the majority in the

> 22 It is also asserted that a majority of legislators, especially the members of the Lower House, represent “traditional elite” interests and fail to champion progressive causes.  But for the topic of decentralization reform, socioeconomic support bases of the legislators are a secondary concern since the stake is mainly over control of fiscal resources between the LGUs and the national government and among the LGUs.

> **23** It is often asserted that legislative passage is a product of political compromise between the president and a majority in the congress and that the most frequently used tool for building such compromise is the president’s discretionary uses of budget release authorities.  Precisely because there is no political party capable of disciplining elected members who stray from the party line, the president could buy votes from individual members of congress to garner enough support for passing a particular piece of legislation.

20