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Separate but not Coequal: Executive-Legislative Dynamics and Lawmaking in the

Philippine Congress1

By Rogelio Alicor L. Panao, PhD2

Abstract

If legislation can gauge success in setting legislative agenda, how does the Philippine

president fare in terms of translating programs into policies before Congress?

The classic view of chief executives in many presidential democracies is that of a

dominant policy actor who exercises not only gate keeping but agenda setting powers. In

the Philippines, by constitutional design the president does not possess formal legislative

powers and is limited by checks imposed by co-equal branches such as a bicameral

legislature and an independent judiciary. I argue, however, that despite the lack of formal

legislative powers the Philippine president dominates policy-making through the timely

and strategic exercise of residual and informal powers such as the prerogative to endorse

priority government legislative proposals.

To test the effect of executive-congress relations a common methodological

approach employed is to estimate ideal points statistically using roll call data. In the

Philippines, however, roll calls show little disparity and legislators tend to vote similarly

on bills under deliberation. As a methodological alternative, I analyze executive-

legislative dynamics through an event history analysis of bills filed and approved at the

House of Representatives between 1987 and 20133—an expansive dataset spanning 26

years, seven congresses, and all five administrations under the post-EDSA Philippines.

Keywords: bicameralism, Congress, executive legislative relations, Philippines, president.

1 Paper for presentation before the 2016 Congress of the International Political Science, Association,

Poznan, Poland, 23-28 July 2016. 2 Assistant professor, Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines, Diliman 3 This study is part of a larger project titled “Does the upper house have the upper hand?: Bicameral

incongruence in the Philippine Congress and its impact on the president’s legislative success” (Project No.

151506 PhDIA) funded by a PhD incentive grant by the University of the Philippines Diliman Office of

the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development.

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If agenda setting powers can be gauged by legislative success, how does the

Philippine president fare in terms of translating programs into policies? What bills that go

through the legislative process have the greatest propensity to become laws? What dooms

proposals to fail? What resources, institutional or otherwise, pertinent to the Philippine

president or Congress, affect executive-legislative dynamics?

Presidential agenda setting as a quasi-legislative tool and policy initiation

determinant of legislative action has been the object of a good deal of scholarly attention

in political science and public policy literature. An agenda, in simple terms, is a list or

schedule of things to be done. In public policy literature, an agenda pertains broadly to

“the list of subjects or problems to which government officials and people outside of

government closely associated with those officials are paying some serious attention at

any given time” (Kingdon 1995, 3).4 Scholars have long recognized the role of the

president as an important actor in setting agenda towards policy (Woon 2008; Larocca

2006; Biggs and Helms 2007; Denzau and MacKay 1983; Enelow 1984; Bamgartner and

Jones 1993; Kingdon 1995), the impact of the president’s agenda in Congress remains

vague. The overall theme in literature, however, appears to be one of recurrent conflicts

and cooperation between the legislature and the executive where no single institution is

particularly predominant (Light 1991; Covington, Wright, and Kinney 1995; Steger 1997;

Wood and Peake 1998; Edwards and Wood 1999). In other words, even if the president

appears to be strong in the policy front, the president does not have complete control of

legislative agenda. Shugart and Carey (1994) notes that even in systems where the

president possesses relatively strong legislative powers vis-à-vis the legislature, it does

not necessarily follow that Congress has completely abdicated its powers.

This contention is particularly apparent in nascent democracies such as the

Philippines where patronage driven politics induces the chief executive to engage in a

quid pro quo relationship with legislators (Kasuya 2005; Kasuya 2008; Hutchcroft 1998;

Quimpo 2009). By constitutional design, the Philippine president exercises no legislative

power except those which the legislature delegates in the exercise of emergency rule.

What the president lacks in terms of direct legislative power, however, is compensated by

certain unilateral powers whose exercise shapes the course of lawmaking in the

Philippines.

I argue that Philippine presidents dominate the legislative process through the

exercise of unilateral prerogatives such as the certification of priority measures. The

Philippine presidents are not endowed with exclusive power to introduce certain

legislation, unlike their counterparts in Uruguay, Chile or Brazil,5 but they can certify

measures as urgent. Under the Philippine constitution, a bill to become law has to

undergo three readings on three separate days. But once a bill is certified by the president,

it becomes priority and bypasses the three-day rule. This imprimatur acts as a signal to

4 For this study, I narrow my focus to executive agenda as an institutional agenda in the context of

legislative policymaking. By institutional agenda, I refer to decision gates through which policy actions

must pass. These are the set of items explicitly up for the active and serious consideration of authoritative

decision makers (Cobb and Elder 1972, 85-87). By executive agenda setting I pertain to the space secured

by the Philippine president on the Congressional agenda for the proposals that encompass the program of

his or her administration. Attaining agenda status is a prerequisite to the passage of a bill. 5 Although, as Shugart and Carey (1992, 151) notes, the exercise of this power is still weak. In these

countries the initiative may be amended or rejected outright by Congress.

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members of Congress on the importance of the measure to address national exigencies.

More importantly, the certification is a warrant that the measure will be accorded greater

congressional attention within the duration of the incumbent Congress. These measures

are coursed through members of Congress, usually allies in the president’s coalition, who

serve as the bills’ principal authors or sponsors. Philippine presidents are able to facilitate

the passage of these priority measures through concessions such as pork earmarks and

campaign pledges.

Instead of looking into the voting patterns of legislators to analyze executive

legislative dynamics, however, I establish the chief executive’s predominance by

analyzing the duration or the length of time executive priority measures undergo the

legislative process. By examining the bills that have been filed and approved at the House

of Representatives between 1987 and 2013, I explain the interplay of resources available

to the executive and Congress as separate branches in the Philippines and how such

relationship have influenced lawmaking—a rich dataset covering 9,191 bills, spanning

seven Congresses, and all five presidential administrations in the post-Martial law

Philippines.

The analysis of legislative delay is important because in the Philippines the

process bills undergo to become laws has a life span of only three years and those that

fail to pass before congress closes need to repeat the process in the next session.

Moreover, the passage of measures may be impelled or delayed by the happening of

events at some point in time (e.g. election, national crisis, public scandal, etc.). Because

legislation entails cost (e.g. bargaining cost, dissonance cost) the president has to be

mindful about keeping the duration of proposed legislation to a minimum. Not only does

delay drive the cost of legislation higher, it also increases the risk that a bill will not pass.

However, no assumption is made about the Philippine president’s agenda setting power

as the strongest or the single most important predictor of legislative success. A theme that

echoes in many legislative studies point to the importance of numerous other variables

other than presidential resources, such as political and institutional influences available to

Congress, to explain legislative outcome. Other institutional and political determinants

can also attenuate, increase, or even modify the effects of other factors that influence the

legislative process.

Two ideas on executive-legislative relations and its effect on legislative

policymaking are advanced as theoretical contributions. The first is that the widely

regarded view on the agenda setting power of the president over legislative policymaking

is not what it seems, as it fails to take into account the confounding effect of institutional

and political circumstances, including time. The second is that where roll call data cannot

be obtained, or in political settings where roll call voting is skewed, executive-legislative

dynamics may be modeled in terms of duration—the length of time it takes from when

the bill is filed until its enactment. A shorter duration implies general consensus. A longer

duration, on the other hand, implies concessions between the executive and the legislature

which had to be undertaken to flesh out inter-branch and intra-branch differences. Even

though there is a standard process provided in the Constitution, much of the country’s

legislative process goes through non-standard and back-channel procedures with the

president playing a major role (Montinola 1999; Coronel 1998; Coronel, et al 2004;

Falguera 2004; Hedman and Sidel 2000). This is also the reason why voting patterns tend

to be uniform. The actual controversy over the bill is not captured by roll call votes but

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may be hinted by legislative delay. These delays may be due to debates to make sure the

soundness of policy, as well as to negotiations and concessions taking place between the

executive and Congress, or even between the two houses of Congress, to hammer out the

bill. These negotiations need not even take place within chamber floors, and thus, actual

roll call votes on measures are reduced to mere formalities.

It is worth mentioning that alternative approaches to the study of legislative

behavior other than roll call analysis have captured the interest of scholars in recent years.

There are studies that looked into cosponsorship data as an alternative to roll call votes in

deriving legislators’ idea points (e.g. Aleman, Calvo, Jones and Kaplan 2009; Crisp,

Desposato and Kanthak 2005). Some have looked into pre- and post- bill introduction

activities as another dimension to explain the patterns of legislative success (Anderson,

Box-Steffensmeier, and Chapman 2003).

The paper proceeds by first giving a background on executive legislative relations

in the Philippines as an institutional reality and how their dynamics shape lawmaking in

the country. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical and conceptual

components from which I build the study’s empirical contributions. I also introduce the

institutional and authorship variables corresponding to the Philippine president and the

bicameral congress. Afterwards, I explain the methodological and statistical approach

used to measure the effect of the Philippine president’s agenda on legislative success. I

then proceed to an analysis of the estimation results, first by providing a descriptive

survey of the dataset, then with a discussion of how the hypotheses were corroborated by

the findings. The paper concludes with a recap of the study’s findings, discusses their

implication on lobbying and legislative groundwork, and suggests areas for further

research.

Executive-Legislative Dynamics and Lawmaking in the Philippines

As a democracy the Philippines is an interesting variety. Although its political

framework is a democratic presidency with formal institutions patterned after U.S.

models, in practice there is the ubiquity of informal institutions familiar in Latin

American democracies. The Philippines also had its share of regime instability and

democratic breakdowns, features that are typical among its Latin American counterparts

(Linz 1990; Linz and Valenzuela 1994; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997).

In the Philippines, elections and most other vital political institutions were

patterned after Western models (specifically the United States) when the Philippines

became a colony by virtue of the Treaty of Paris shortly after the Revolution of 1898.

The United States initially established a military government, then afterwards a civil

government in 1901. The establishment of the Philippine Assembly in 1907 gave the

country its first bicameral legislature and its first foray into the American model of

democracy. Commonwealth status was granted to the country in 1935, in preparation to

full independence in 1946.

Democracy was stalled for more than two decades when Marcos put the country

under martial law, created a unicameral legislature, and ruled as a virtual dictator. Marcos

was ousted in the historic People Power uprising in 1986. At present the Philippines

follows a democratic and republican government, as enshrined in the 1987 Constitution.

The president functions as both head of state and head of government, elected by popular

vote for a single six-year term. The bicameral Congress, on the other hand, is composed

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of the Senate whose members are elected to a six-year term, and a House of

Representatives elected to a three year term and whose constituencies comprise the

legislative districts in provinces and the marginalized groups from various sectors.

Both the president and members of the senate are elected by plurality vote with

the entire nation as their constituents. Both the chief executive and senate members are

also elected to serve 6-year terms. Members of the House of Representatives, on other

hand, are elected by plurality vote in single-member constituencies to serve 3-year terms

(except party list representatives who by law must comprise 20 percent of House

membership and are elected through a closed-list proportional representation system to

serve 3-year terms).

In the Philippines, the power to craft laws is vested in a bicameral legislature

voting separately but the president can set the legislative agenda by certifying bills urgent

and rallying party allies to sponsor them. A bill certified urgent becomes a priority

measure and no longer needs to undergo the three-day rule6 for passage in a legislative

chamber, just like the “urgency and necessity decrees” available to the president of

Argentina (Mustapic 2002, 29). But if a legislator has objections to a measure, however,

the usual recourse is to subject it to further deliberation (which in effect is stalling its

passage), propose revisions, or sponsor alternative or substitute versions. When a bill

certified urgent by the president is finally subjected to roll call, it is but the last stage in a

long tedious process of negotiation. Neither do final votes pertaining to the bill reflect the

concessions that have been given along the way.

The Philippine legislature pertains to its two branches, the Senate and the House

of Representatives (Congresspersons), and each is motivated by different sets of interests

and preferences. In terms of policy inclination senators are closer to the president given

that their constituencies are the nation at large. Elected from single member districts, on

the other hand, representatives are accountable to their local constituencies whose votes

they must obtain if they wish to be reelected. As such, political dynasties, pork barreling,

entrepreneurial legislation, patronage, and other familiar characteristics of Philippine

politics whose clientilistic features tend to constrain lawmaking, also tend to be more

apparent at the House of Representatives.

Moreover, by constitutional design, there are certain bills that the Constitution

requires to originate exclusively in the House of Representatives (Art. VI, Sec. 24). These

include appropriation bills or bills which appropriate a sum of money from the public

treasury for a public purpose; revenue bills or those which are specifically designed to

raise money through imposition or levy; tariff bills; bills authorizing the increase of

public debt; bills of local application; and private bills. The rationale for assigning the

prerogative over these types of legislation makes sense since members of the House

represent specific constituencies from different parts of the country, are better acquainted

with the needs of their localities, and supposedly, are better equipped to formulate

measures that address these needs. Bills of local application include public works and

infrastructure projects that benefit the countryside. Appropriation and revenue measures,

6 The 1987 Philippine Constitution requires all bills deliberated by a chamber, whether the House or the

Senate, to undergo three readings on three separate days. Once passed in a chamber, a bill shall undergo the

usual process in the other chamber, unless the measure was certified urgent in the other chamber. Needless

to say, whether a measure is certified urgent or not, a bicameral conference committee may be called to

reconcile differences between the versions arising from both chambers.

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on the other hand, are those which allow for the provision or the disposition of funds in

favor of a public activity.

As institutional players, the president and the legislators expect different set of

utilities from their respective policy preferences. The president is not eligible for

reelection but nonetheless eligible to run for other elective office.7 It is crucial, therefore,

to maintain an air of competence and credibility as a leader. Moreover, the public

continuously looks upon the achievement of the president as gauge of the effectiveness of

government thus an incumbent must ensure not to be unseated or lose popularity midway

his or her tenure. The support of an able president is deemed vital by many members of

the House particularly those seeking reelection in midterm political cycles. Because

incumbent presidents are typically also head of their political parties, many aspirants seek

their endorsement.

Members of the House of Representatives, on the other hand, while not eligible to

serve for more than three consecutive terms, are nevertheless allowed to serve in

subsequent three consecutive terms after the interim, run for local elective posts, or set

their sight on the Senate or higher elective office.

In this context, representatives’ choice of bills to file can be a strong indicator of

issues they want to be identified with and the reputation they want to build. A bill can be

a sincere manifestation of the demands of constituencies. For the more ambitious, it can

also be a strategic tool for catapulting one’s political career. The bill author can be a

policy entrepreneur, as when he pitches before his colleagues the importance of

addressing an issue through legislation, or a middleman as when he or she acts as the

president’s advocate for the latter’s executive agenda.

The propensity of a bill to become law then is a function of institutional and

author-specific variables, economic realities, and time. One particularly important

institutional feature is the prerogative of the president to certify certain measures as

priority. Once invoked, it signals Congress that the bill is part of the executive agenda

and deserves immediate action. Theoretically, the prerogative is not compulsory and

more than anything is merely an indication of programs the incumbent administration

hopes to achieve through legislation. In reality, many important laws passed in recent

years were measures certified priority by the president in line with the thrust of

government to set the country into course. The executive is able to achieve legislative

success by offering concessions to members of Congress in the form of electoral support

and pork (Stein and Bickers 1994). But since the president is not eligible for reelection

the impact of this carrot and stick approach varies over time. The pledge of electoral

support, for instance, may be very relevant to a member of Congress during the midterm

Congressional election (halfway the president’s term) but perhaps of less significance

when the president approaches the end of his or her term. Moreover, even if the president

is successful in consolidating support at one chamber (either the House or the Senate) the

other chamber can still hold the president’s measures hostage. The other house may

introduce amendments or completely stall the passage of the bill altogether. The bill can

be delayed further as the president tries to arrange concessions with the other chamber.

The effect of presidential agenda may also be diluted. One outcome which quantitative

7 Or at least this has become the de facto interpretation of the single term restriction for the president after

former Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s election to the 2nd district of Pampanga in the 15

th Congress (2010-

2013).

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data may not be able to explain is when the president certifies an agenda as urgent but

only in paper and does not give a marching order to allies in Congress to facilitate the

bill’s deliberation.

The Philippine president as agenda setter

To gauge whether indeed the Philippine president is a dominant actor in

legislative policymaking I analyze the legislative success of measures that encompass

what is referred to as the president’s legislative agenda. By legislative success, I pertain

not simply to the eventual passage of a bill into law, but the propensity, or the rate over

time, by which these measures pass into law.

Under the Philippine constitution, however, the Philippine president is not vested

with formal authority to compel the legislature to turn his programs into legislation. The

Philippine president, unlike his counterparts in other presidential democracies in Latin

America such as Brazil, cannot even stall the passage of a law even though the last step in

the legislative process involves the president’s hand and seal. The president may choose

not to act on a bill approved by Congress submitted to him for signature but 30 days upon

submission the bill will become law just the same. The president may, of course, veto a

bill but this has been exercised rarely,8 and may still be overridden by 2/3 votes of

Congress.

In this context, the Philippine president does not seem to have an advantage in

terms of legislative agenda setting. However, the same constitution that provided strong

checks against the president also granted the prerogative to certify certain measures as

urgent. The prerogative is not, in a strict sense of the word, a legislative power because it

cannot by itself compel the passage of a measure either.

For sure, the sheer prerogative to certify measures as priority alone will not ensure

its passage. However, such certification ensures that the measure at hand will have a

priority treatment before Congress, enough at least to warrant its passage during the span

of the incumbent Congress’ sessions.

Why is a guarantee of approval important? Legislators, executive middlemen, and

Congressional researchers in the Philippines are well aware of the importance of such

warrant in a context where the likelihood of a bill being passed is coterminous with the

incumbent Congress. In the House, a bill filed may fail to make it to third reading where

it is voted on roll call. Even if it does, it may still fail to hurdle the same process in the

Senate. In any case, when a bill fails to pass before the closing of the current Congress it

simply cannot be revived in the next. It would have to be reintroduced and undergo the

same tedious process of sponsorship, committee deliberation, and debates, not to mention

the concessions that have to be given along the way.

Congressional agenda setters are known to take the president into account when

making proposals on the floor (Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2004; Fett 1994; Kiewiet and

McCubbins 1988; Mouw and Mackuen 1992; Canes-Wrone 2001). In at least one cross

comparative study involving Chile, bills prioritized by the president via urgency motions

and bills falling within presidential policy domains such as appropriation measures were

found to enjoy a higher likelihood of passage than other measures (Aleman and Navia

2009). In the Philippines, measures certified urgent by the president need not comply

8 An exception may be President Benigno Simeon Aquino’s under whose term a considerable number of

important bills were vetoed. This by itself merits further scholarly introspection.

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with the procedural requirements stipulated by the Constitution that tend to delay the

passage of measures.

The idea of presidents as veto players and agenda setters has a long history in

political science scholarship. For decades, scholars have maintained that the president

plays a significant, if not the most significant, role in setting policymaking into motion.

In the United States, John Kingdon’s (1995, 23) thorough study of the Washington

agenda found that “no other single actor in the political system has quite the capability of

the president” to set agenda. The president is thought to be able to single handedly set the

agenda not only in the executive branch, but also in Congress and beyond. Baumgartner

and Jones’ (1993, 241) broad examination of agenda setting showed that “no other single

actor can focus attention as clearly, or change the motivations of such a great number of

other actors, as the president.” The influence of presidents may be impelled by how

executive agenda are “packaged” and pursued (Bond and Fleisher 1990, 230). Even

scholars who are cautious of taking a presidency centered view of governance recognize

the agenda setting power of presidents and its use as a strategic advantage (Edwards

1989; Jones 1994; Moe and Teel 1970).

In many studies governments have been shown to dominate the legislative agenda

by sponsoring the bulk of legislation and ensuring a high rate of success for their bills.

Even in presidential systems where government does not have the majority, an

administration may improve the likelihood of enacting legislation by strategically

adjusting the president’s proposals to accommodate legislator’s preferences. Presidents

can either censor or modify controversial programs likely to generate substantial

opposition to ensure a higher likelihood of passage (Denzau and Mackay 1983; Enelow

1984). When presidents attempt to influence legislative policymaking, they maximize the

attainment of preferences by pushing legislators to accept outcomes closer to their

preferred positions. When presidents accommodate legislators, on the other hand, they

increase the chance of bills to become law by moving the content of proposals toward the

position favored by majority of the legislators (Steger 1997). Studies generally agree that

presidents in most modern democracies resort to both as a matter of strategy.

The constitutional prerogative of the Philippine president to signify a bill urgent

can be regarded as an institutional advantage. But to what extent is it able to translate

proposals into actual policies? Arguably, the exercise of this prerogative has its costs

such as patronage and pork politics. These practices are not uncommon in presidential

systems where strongly empowered political actors are known to “systematically employ

them as ordinary rule” (Fresno 2006, 1). Thus, bills certified urgent by the president—

those that pertain broadly to executive agenda—are expected to enjoy greater propensity9

to be approved.

Institutional, political, and author-related determinants of legislative success

The Philippine president’s agenda setting power, however, is not construed to be

the single most important predictor of legislative success. In this study, I control for

institutional and author-specific factors known in literature to influence the likelihood of

9 Propensity in this study is used roughly to correspond to hazard as it is understood in duration analysis—

that is, “the risk of failure in an interval after time t, conditional on the subject having survived to time t”

(Hosmer, Lemeshow, and May 2008, 62). Failure refers to the happening of an event, in this case the

passage of a bill into law.

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a bill to become law. Among the political resources available to the chief executive I

include public approval (Brody and Sigelman 1983; Tufte 1975; Abramowitz 1985;

Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002; Rivers and Rose 1985; Neustadt 1990; Altman 2000;

Navia and Nava 2009; Neto 2004), which here corresponds to the net satisfaction scores

of presidents released by the Social Weather Stations.10 I also control for the length of the

president’s tenure (Shugart 1995; Hager and Sullivan 1994; Johnson and Roberts 2004;

Ostrom and Job 1986; Ostrom and Simon 1988; Rivers and Rose 1985; Neustadt 1960;

Neustadt 1990; Abramowitz 1985; Cover 1986; Gronke, Koch, and Wilson 2003) which

is particularly important in the case of the Philippine president who can serve at the helm

of the nation’s leadership for only a single term.

It may be argued, of course, that presidents’ ability to influence policy may ebb as

they approach their exit. Lameduck, originally a business term used to describe someone

who was insolvent or in default, has now become a common expression in the literature

to pertain to a president who may not be able to run for a reelection, or who is running on

a midterm Congressional election (Neustadt 1990). However, a number of studies have

found no support for the view that presidential influence follows a temporal path

(Sullivan 1991; Hager and Sullivan 1994; Collier and Sullivan 1995). What evidence

shows, according to Sullivan (1991) using the Johnson presidency in the U.S. as case, is

that presidents typically lose initial support but maintain sway over their tenure. Edwards

(1991) had some misgivings about Sullivan’s approach and findings. He agreed, however,

that influence need not be declining since the president’s public approval may vary

within the president’s term. More recently, Rottinghaus (2006) found that presidents use

their popularity (or reelection in the case of the U.S.) to engage the public to support

policies, and maintain continuous effectiveness throughout their tenure. This findings,

says Rottinghaus (2006, 730), “remake our view of second term presidencies from ‘lame

ducks’ to graceful swans and indicate that presidential ‘lame duck’ behavior may

therefore be more conventional myth than reality.”

I also control for membership in the president’s political coalition and the effect

of partisanship (Mershon 1996; Howell, Adler, Cameron, and Riemann 2000; Krehbiel

1993; Edwards, Barrett, and Peake 1997; Krehbiel 1998; Mayhew 2005). In the

Philippines, aspiring politicians tend to affiliate with parties that have viable presidential

candidates, even at the cost of switching parties, or launching new parties, if necessary

(Montinola 1999; Kasuya 2008; Choi 2001). I take membership in the president’s

coalition as an institutional advantage that gives members leverage over other members,

regardless of the volatility of the party system and the fact that the composition of such

coalitions can change with each election (Bach and Smith 1988; Cox 2001; Cox and

McCubbins 1993; Binder 1997; Oleszek 1996).

Authorship characteristics taken into account include experience (Mayhew 1974;

Mayhew 1991; Ferejohn 1977; Wolfinger and Heifetz 1965; Fiorina 1977; Schiller 1995;

Meinke and Hasecke 2003; Chen and Niou 2005), which in this case pertains to the actual

number of years a district representative has been elected into office. In the Philippines,

10 Established in August 1985, the Social Weather Stations is a Philippine based non stock nonprofit social

research institution regularly tapped, among others, to conduct national cross country surveys such as the

International Social Survey program (ISSP), the World Values Survey, and the Comparative Study of

Electoral Systems.

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the constitution restricts representatives to no more than three consecutive terms.

However, this provision does not bar them from running for the same office after the

lapse of the interim. I also control for the policy salience of introduced measures by

categorizing bills into either of local or national significance (coded 1 if a bill is of

national significance), consistent with the idea that particularistic bills benefiting only a

particular constituency or locality are more likely to pass than controversial measures that

contain policies aimed at regulating broad economic or national activities (Anderson,

Box-Stefensmeier, and Chapman 2003; Molinas, et al 2008; Mouw and Mackuen 1992;

Talbert and Potoski 2002; Wood and Peake 1998; Lapinski 2008). I also test the effect of

committee leadership (Evans 1991; Kollman 1997; Krehbiel, Shepsle, and Weingast

1987).

There is, strictly speaking, no sequencing in the Philippine congress except for

bills that the constitution provides explicitly to originate from the lower house (e.g.

appropriation or revenue measures). Nevertheless, I include variables that control for the

effect of bicameralism and test for the hastening effect of initiatives that originate from

the Senate (Druckman and Thies 2002; Rogers 1998; Hiroi 2008). I adopt Hiroi’s (2008)

operational definition of bicameral incongruence, computed as the difference between the

share of the president’s party in the Senate and House of Representatives. In the

Philippine congress, no bill becomes law unless with the concurrence of the bicameral

chambers. To reconcile conflicting provisions and interests between chambers bicameral

conferences are requested typically right after a bill is passed on third reading in one

chamber.

Finally, I control for the effect of economic shocks. Unemployment, recession,

and periodic bouts of inflation impact not only the policy direction of governments but

the behavior of policy actors. Among politicians, loyalties are tested during periods of

deep economic crunches when legislators have to weigh the demands of their political

parties with the interests of their constituencies. I use monthly inflation to gauge the

effect of socioeconomic conditions on legislative activity, consistent with the idea that

increased levels of economic distress tend to heighten legislative productivity,

particularly those that propose economic policies (Calvo 2007; Hiroi, 2008; Fukumoto,

2008).

Method

I model the Philippine president’s success in legislative agenda setting as a Cox

hazard function where delay is construed as the time it takes for a measure to hurdle the

legislative process.

To estimate legislative delays scholars in the social sciences have employed a

wide array of approaches including cross tabulations, linear regressions and logit or

probit models. In recent years, however, there has been a growing preference for event

history models, such as the Cox model, that flexibly relaxes the assumption of parametric

shape and at the same time adjust for the non proportional properties of covariates of

interests. The preference for these types of models is not merely a matter of statistical

sophistication but impelled by theoretical issues that are raised in political analysis.

Admittedly, many questions in political science involve some kind of risk, that is, the risk

of a certain political event happening. In this study, for instance, my main objective is to

measure the effect of institutional and author specific variables on the “risk” of a bill

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being approved into law. Duration models have an advantage of directly incorporating

the notion of risk in the estimation parameters. Moreover, unlike, say traditional time

series models where an entity is examined over time, event history can accommodate

“many information on many observations over time” (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004,

3). This makes inferences derived from duration models quite powerful. Researchers can

make claims not only about the factors that impel the risk of a political event but also

how differences across systems are related to this risk.

Another advantage of duration models is their ability to take into account

“censored” data or when an observation’s full event history is unobserved. In ordinary

least square regressions, censored cases are simply ignored, thus, inducing a form of

selection bias in the results. In duration analysis, however, it is possible to construct a

likelihood function to accommodate censoring if the censoring points are known in the

data.

Yet another noteworthy advantage of duration models is their ability to account

for covariates that have effects that vary over time. Certainly, the ability to take into

account the effect of time as a determinant is not unique to survival models and is

competently handled in time series or cross sectional time series models. But whereas

traditional regression models tend to treat the effect of variables as static or “time-

invariant” even though accounting for time, in parametric models the analysis of

changing effects over time is incorporated in the analysis (Box-Steffensemeier and Jones

2004, 19).

However, the choice of a specific duration model to test time dependency in event

history data has to satisfy two important considerations. First, the use of certain models,

particularly parametric models, must be based on a strong theoretical expectation about

the shape of the hazard rate (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones). Because the distribution has

to be inevitably interpreted by the researcher, if the parameterization is wrong then the

results of the estimation of the covariates can be misleading. Second, there must be strong

theoretical reasons to prefer one distribution function (among the list of parametric

models available) over others. The Cox model offers an attractive alternative given the

abovementioned constraints. The Cox model is ideal for this study since in modeling the

effects of the variables to time, I am making no assumption as to the specific shape of the

duration dependency. Moreover, my interest is more on establishing the theoretical

relationship of the covariates on the president and Congress and how these institutions

shape lawmaking, than with the ancillary parameters that are relevant in other duration

models but can make interpretation tenuous.

The duration or delay, corresponding to the total time it takes until a bill becomes

law, is a continuous positive integer measured in number of days. The concept of delay is

based on the idea that timing is a tool susceptible to strategic use for the benefit of certain

actors or coalitions. Studies (Cheibub, Feigueredo and Limongi 2000; Binder and

Maltzman 2002; Fresno 2006) have shown, employing various cases, that time is a key

element in the political analysis of strategic behavior. Delaying or speeding up political

processes, it turns out, is not a random behavior but a means by which skilled actors such

as powerful executives or ruling parties with scarce majorities control the agenda.

In the literature, the question of what factors account for variation in legislative

duration is framed mainly in terms of time until the occurrence of bill adoption. With

respect to survival or event history models, this corresponds to the hazard rate of

12

adoption, namely the conditional probability that a bill is adopted at a particular time

interval (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004). Scholars liken this trajectory of a bill to

driving a car from the beginning to the end of a variably congested highway. Driving in

the hypothetical legislative highway can take longer or shorter, depending on such factors

as traffic at specific times, ruthlessness of the driver, helpfulness of other drivers, and

road conditions.

Delay is measured in days, that is, the total number of days a measure undergoes

the legislative process from its filing until its enactment or veto by the president.

Enactment here can either pertain to the president’s action of signing the bill into law or

the act of the bill lapsing into law. By constitutional provision an enrolled bill or one that

is up for the president’s signature can only be vetoed, not rejected. If the president does

not act on the bill, it becomes a law 30 days from its submission. To prevent a bill’s

passage the president can only veto, otherwise the bill will lapse into law notwithstanding

the president’s inaction.

Results

Table 1 gives a descriptive summary of the duration of the legislative process for

various types of bills. The life span of a bill in this case is defined as the time from the

date of its introduction or filing, until the date the bill was signed into legislation by the

president or lapsed into law. Censored bills, those which failed to pass during the

incumbency of the deliberating Congress, exit the dataset on the date Congress comes to

a close since technically the life of a pending bill is coterminous and bills revived in

succeeding Congresses have to undergo the process all over.

Measures filed in Congress take on average about 625 days or 1.71 years to pass

into law. The shortest time it took a bill to pass was three days. The longest time a bill

underwent the legislative mill was 1,781 days or about five years (the 8th Congress served

for more than five years or about as long as the late president Corazon Aquino’s tenure).

Bills certified urgent by the president, however, appear to become law at a faster rate than

average. There were only 255 certified priority measures11 during the period studied, 233

of which became law. This constitutes roughly just 7 percent of the total 3,899 measures

enacted into legislation. But the mean for urgent measures of about 258 days, suggests

that when the president turns a measure into priority legislation the average time it spends

on the bicameral chambers is about thrice shorter than the average for all other types of

bills.

A great bulk of the laws in the data comprises local legislation, including

measures catering to specific constituencies and private bills. In fact about three out of

four legislative proposals would pertain to bills of local significance (75.8%). But on

average laws of national significance enjoy greater attention on average (425 days).

Bills that originate in the Senate also appear to hurdle the legislative mill with

greater ease than their counterparts originating from the House of Representatives (388

days on average). The longest time it took a Senate initiated legislative proposal to

become law was 4.6 years, whereas the slowest moving legislative proposal in the lower

11 This includes bills certified as “administrative” during the 8

th and 9

th Congress based on the

recommendation of Terence Grana, Chief of the Bills Monitoring Section. According to Grana, bills

certified as administrative were unique to the first two post Marcos Congresses. These bills, he said, can be

grouped alongside bills certified as urgent because they also pertain specifically to government initiatives.

13

house took almost 5 years. This may well be since the Philippine Senate as an institution

is able to build a more equipped informational and expertise base than the House of

Representatives. Compared to House members who serve three year terms, Philippine

senators serve for six years and thus are less distracted to campaign during Congressional

elections. Moreover, the constitutional provision limiting bills of local application to

originate exclusively at the House of Representatives induces the Senate to concentrate

on the legislation of measures that address pressing national concerns or require deep

scrutiny and debate from various sectors of society. Interestingly, bills certified urgent by

the president oftentimes also happen to be bills that address urgent national concerns.

Table 1. Life Span of Bills (in Days)

Figures in parenthesis refer to the number of observations

Source: Legislative Information System, House of Representatives, Philippines (2015)

Of the bills introduced between the 8th and 15

th Congress, only about four out of

ten (3899 out of 9191 bills) would muster the approval of the bicameral chambers and

enacted into legislation. By constitutional design, the president has no power to stall the

passage of a measure once an enrolled bill is submitted for signature unless he opts to

veto the measure. But post Marcos presidents, it appears, were generally circumspect

about resorting to this action and only in 174 occasions did presidents actually invoke the

power to veto. Typically the president signs measures that have been submitted for action.

It is hardly relevant, however, if the president chooses to sit on a bill already approved by

both houses of Congress because it still automatically lapses into law 30 days upon

submission.

12 A bill that fails to obtain the concurrence of both houses does not become law. In this study this refers to

when either the Senate failed to approve the bill, or when the two chambers cannot agree on a common or

consolidated version.

By Type

Number of

bills passed

Mean

(days)

Min.

(days)

Max.

(days)

Certified urgent by the president 233 (255) 258.16 3 1320

Bills of national significance 989 (2221) 425.08 3 1679

Bills of local significance 3084 (6969) 689.19 10 1781

All types of bills 4073 (9191) 625.06 3 1781

By Outcome

Became law 3899 616.76 3 1781

Failed to obtain bicameral concurrence12

5118 704.39 36 1805

Vetoed by the president 174 811.27 114 1706

Signed by the president into law 3024 616.10 3 1781

Lapsed into law upon president's inaction 875 619.01 79 1315

By Origin

Bill originated from the House 3673 (8791) 650.88 7 1781

Bill originated from the Senate 400 (400) 388.02 3 1679

14

What institutional and political factors, therefore, hasten the propensity of

measures to be enacted into legislation? And how effective is the president in laying

down legislative agenda?

Table 2 summarizes the result of the estimates after correcting for violation of the

nonproportionality assumption. Three of the covariates exhibit nonproportionality:

presidential agenda, policy salience, and bill origin, and were interacted with analysis

time.

Table 2. Propensity of Approval of Bills, Philippine House of Representatives, 1987 to 2013

Time as dependent variable Expected sign Coefficients

President

Agenda setting (priority bills) + 2.188*** (0.206)

Agenda x Time -0.00410*** (0.000651)

Bill author belongs to the president’s party + -0.0147 (0.0374)

President’s public approval rating + 0.00228*** (0.000624)

One year before the end of the president’s + 0.393*** (0.0716)

House of Representatives

Legislative experience + 0.0148*** (0.00366)

Bill author is committee chair + -0.0706* (0.0349)

Bill salience (national significance) - 4.452*** (0.161)

Bill salience x Time -0.00653*** (0.000263)

Bicameral controls

Senate origin of the bill + 1.046*** (0.126)

Senate origin x Time 0.000110 (0.000262)

Incongruence - -0.248* (0.0994)

Socioeconomic condition (lagged monthly inflation) - -1.957* (0.939)

N = 9191

Standard errors in parentheses * p < 0.05,

** p < 0.01,

*** p < 0.001

Consistent with expectation, the result of the Cox regression estimates suggest

that the certification of priority by the president increases the propensity of a bill to be

approved into legislation. There is strong support for the hypothesis on the hastening

effect of presidential agenda setting on legislative action. The coefficient of its interaction

with time is negative, suggesting that its effect diminishes over time (Licht 2011). For

instance, 90 days upon filing, the effect of presidential agenda on legislative delay is to

hasten the passage of such measure by about six times. After six months the effect is still

to hasten passage by four times. After a year, the effect is reduced but such bill still has a

greater propensity to become law by about twice compared to other bills. But if such bill

remains pending two years upon its filing, there is now a risk of delay by 55 percent.

When exactly does the pivotal event take place when the effect of presidential

agenda starts to delay instead of hastening bill passage? The point where they cancel each

other out is the ratio of the coefficient of the constitutive term and the interactive term

(Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 1998; see also Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 2001; Box-

Steffensmeier and Jones 2004; Licht 2011). In this case, it is about 534 days from the

15

introduction of the priority measure. In other words, while executive clout significantly

hastens the passage of priority measures, the president and his or her allies must make

sure these bills do not stay in the chambers longer than about a year and a half.

Prior to Belgica v. Excutive Secretary13 and Araullo v Aquino

14 (which

effectively outlawed discretionary congressional disbursements) Philippine presidents

exercised wide latitude over the control and release of congressional earmarks. The funds

and the manner in which presidents program their disbursement serve as an effective

bargaining mechanism not just to ensure support within the president’s coalition but to

thwart potential opposition. Philippine presidents are known to literally grease the

legislative mill to ensure the smooth and speedy passage of their legislative programs

(Araral 2006; Kasuya 2005). Likely opponents are threatened either of a delay in the

release of earmarks or difficulty in disbursement—prospects which can hold hostage the

projects that legislators promised to constituencies during election campaigns.

The estimation results also show a very significant relationship between the

duration until passage of a measure and the president’s public approval. For instance, a

bill filed when the president’s public approval is +65 has about 15 percent greater

propensity to be passed into law. This approval rating is actually close to what former

President Fidel V. Ramos enjoyed in September 1992.15 The likelihood of approval of

legislative measures also increases as the president is about to exit. This lends support not

only to the view that presidents initially try to accumulate institutional and political

support at the start of their term, but that they continuously strive to build political capital

in the entire duration of their incumbency (Sullivan 1991; Collier and Sullivan 1995;

Rottinghaus 2006). Studies have suggested how legislators in the Philippines tie their

political prospects to the single-term president (Kasuya 2008; Choi 2001). The findings

relate the “common fate” perspective (Abramowitz 1985; Cover 1986; Gronke, Koch,

and Wilson 2003) to legislative policymaking and suggest that Philippine legislators are

as concerned with legislative achievement as much as the president.

Interestingly, partisanship does not seem to have any clout when it comes to

policy peddling in Congress. Belonging to the same party as the president, it appears,

even heightens delay but this is not statistically significant.

For bill authors in the Philippine lower house experience appears to be an

important catalyst of legislative production. Legislators appear to become more

successful in facilitating the passage of their bills the longer they are in office. This

finding is consistent with the investment logic of term limits (Dal Bo and Rossi 2008;

Kousser 2005) which argues that longer serving legislators fare better in terms of

performance not only because they are able to invest a stock of expertise but because an

expectation of a longer horizon to capture returns induces them to bear the cost of

investing in legislative activities. Committee leadership also appears to be significant

predictors of favorable intracameral and intercameral approval.

The estimate, contrary to the hypothesis, shows a positive relationship between

bill salience and duration, and renders strong support to the assumption about the

hastening effect of policy salience on lawmaking. However, the impact of bills of

13 G.R. No. 208566 November 19, 2013

14 G.R. No. 209287 July 1, 2014

15 Fidel V. Ramos, Corazon Aquino’s chief of staff, succeeded her as president and had an approval rating

of +66 in September 1992.

16

national significance also exhibits nonproportionality, suggesting that it tends to vary

with time. Generally, legislation providing state or local remedies are less controversial

and, thus, more prone to logrolling than legislation with national implications (Anderson,

Box-Stefensmeier, and Chapman 2011). This view is not definite and findings tend to

vary depending on the political context of the country under study and the research focus.

Bills certified as urgent by Philippine presidents happen to be mostly laws of national

significance even though laws of national significance comprise only about one in four

measures. But precisely because many laws catering to narrow interests or specific

constituencies are filed there is stiffer competition for Congressional attention. There is a

pecking order in which the author’s membership in the president’s coalition,

administrative expertise due to seniority, or the president’s certification of urgency can be

pivotal in facilitating the legislative process. Congress in general is more inclined to

hasten the passage of measures that address the pressing concerns of the entire nation

over measures that provide for the needs of narrow constituencies. Over time, however,

say, in anticipation of an approaching election, legislative attention tends to revert back to

the passage of bills that benefit specific constituencies and which are likely to win votes

for their sponsors.

The results also confirm the hypothesis that measures first proposed in the Senate

enjoy a greater likelihood of legislative attention. This could well be because bills

originating in the Senate, being typically of national significance, benefit from the

confounding effect of issue focus and presidential agenda. At first glance, this finding

appears to be in conflict with past studies ascribing a first mover advantage to the House

of Representatives (e.g. Hiroi 2008; Rogers 1998). But, as mentioned previously, in the

context of lawmaking in the Philippines sequence matters only for a narrow set of

legislations which the constitution requires to originate from the House (e.g.

appropriation bills and private bills). These laws aside, a bill may originate either in the

House of Representatives or the Senate, or even simultaneously upon the introduction of

counterpart versions. The Philippine Senate, it should be mentioned, has traditionally

been equipped with a better informational and expertise base. Most legislation of national

significance, which more often than not require thoughtful scrutiny and debate, originate

in the Senate. Bills that have national significance, in turn, are likely to be certified as

urgent by the president. Likewise, electoral rules ensure that the Senate is not completely

dissolved during elections as half of the membership is retained and the other half is

replaced or reelected every three years. This is to encourage the maintenance of Senate

policies as well as guarantee that there will be experienced members who can guide and

assist new senators in the discharge of their duties. Bicameral incongruence, on the other

hand, appears to contribute to the delay of bills in the legislative mill.

Monthly inflation is adopted as a crude proxy for socioeconomic condition. The

findings suggest a significant negative relationship between bleak economic periods and

bill passage. The result fits nicely with the assumption about legislature’s decreased

activity during times of economic difficulties. I offer two possible explanations for this

behavior. One relates to fiscal prudence. In the Philippines, most common areas of

legislation are those that involve some form of public spending or appropriation. The

results suggest that during times of economic hardships legislators tend to be more

circumspect in the deliberation of bills submitted for approval. Another explanation that

echoes in the literature relates to the president’s anticipation of oppositional policy

17

response during periods of exogenous macroeconomic and political shocks (Mackuen

1983; Brule and Hwang 2010; Fenno 1978). Because an economic bill from the

opposition can suggest ineptness on the part of presidents and their allies, presidents

divert the legislature and work to derail policies.

Conclusion

To sum, the president’s certification of priority to a broad set of measures—which

in this study encompassed the president’s legislative agenda—exhibits strong and direct

implication on legislation. Priority bills that make up the president’s core programs and

policies are likely to be enacted into law at a faster rate than other measures, all else

constant. However, this effect is not fixed and at some point being presidential agenda

can also induce delay to these measures.

Other resources available to the president also display direct significant effects on

bill approval. How the public hold the president in esteem and how they evaluate his or

her performance (strong public approval) can hasten the passage of measures in general.

On the part of the president as the country’s chief policymaker, bills are more likely to

pass when the president has already spent a considerable time in office and presumably

invested in legislative activities than during the early part of his or her tenure. The

conventional view on the implication of partisan or coalitional preference, however, does

not seem to apply in the context of Philippine legislative policymaking.

Authorship characteristics and the institutional features of the House of

Representatives can also determine the fate of a bill as it undergoes the legislative process.

Years spent as representative in general has a direct positive effect on the propensity of

bills to become law, suggesting that seniority, political experience, as well as the

attendant political investments that go with legislative groundwork induces legislators to

work more proactively toward the passage of bills into law. The type of bill proposed can

also facilitate its eventual success. Congress in general is more inclined to hasten the

passage of measures that address the pressing concerns of the entire nation over measures

that provide for the needs of narrow constituencies. Over time, however, say, in

anticipation of an approaching election, legislative attention tends to revert back to the

passage of bills that benefit specific constituencies and which are likely to win votes for

their sponsors.

The House of Representatives, however, does not operate as a monolith and by

constitutional design it needs the concurrence of the Senate to fulfill its mandate.

Bicameralism as an institutional feature can also constrain the legislative process and

both houses of the Philippine bicameral Congress are no stranger to each other’s dilatory

devices and non germane amendments. As it turns out, bills that originate from the Senate

enjoy a greater propensity for passage than those from the lower house. Bills that are

initiated by the Senate usually carry issues that are urgent and national in scope, thus,

requiring more attention and dispatch.

Exogenous economic shocks can also restrain legislative activity and reduce the

propensity of bill approval. This may well be in keeping with government’s exercise of

fiscal prudence and regulating spending levels. Another, less flattering, explanation

relates to the president’s anticipation of economic bills coming from the opposition.

Policy initiatives from the opposition during times of crisis can ruin the reputation as well

18

as the support base of the administration, thus, the president and his or her allies try to

divert Congress’ attention and work to derail policies.

On the whole, the findings confirm a widely held notion about the nature and

extent of the Philippine president’s power. Eminent Filipino scholar of politics Remigio

Agpalo distinguishes the Philippines’ brand of presidency from Anglo-American types by

the premium it places on the “supremacy” of the executive (Agpalo 1999, 46) and it is

understandable why. In the context of Philippine politics only the president is counted on

to give real leadership to rid the nation’s lingering concerns. Neither the judiciary nor

Congress is burdened with such responsibility for their members seldom agree among

themselves. And, ultimately, it is the president who is judged by history for government’s

broken promise and policy misstep.

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