Voting independently of the surveys

Preelection surveys do often take the form of self-fulfilling oracles. This happens when voters find the published results so compelling as to make them vote according to the predictions. The opposite, of course, can happen. Voters may react to survey results in such a way as to be motivated to prevent them from being realized … Read more

Permit to campaign

Bizarre as it is, politicians running for local positions have come to accept it as part of the political reality: that in some remote Philippine communities, candidates must secure a clearance from armed illegal groups before they can enter an area and campaign. The permit to campaign is normally given in exchange for a cash … Read more

Riding and dining in Panay

I had strong reservations about going on a long motorcycle ride in this sweltering summer heat.  When you are on a bike and you are going fast, you don’t notice you are sweating. The water your body secretes to cool you down evaporates in the wind as quickly as it forms on the skin. Dehydration … Read more

Citizenship

It’s one of those moments in a democracy when we’re reminded that the rights of citizenship come with corresponding duties. I refer to the fact that the deadline for the filing of income tax returns this year came just a month before the midterm elections. This fortuitous sequencing of two vital events that mark our … Read more

Is the Catholic Church in crisis?

A survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) in February this year highlights three interesting findings on the state of Catholicism in the Philippines. First, that weekly church attendance has significantly gone down from a high of 64 percent in July 1991 to a low of 37 percent in February 2013.  Second, that only … Read more

Why political families are more brazen today

There’s no hard evidence to confirm it.  But the growing perception is that at no other time in our nation’s political history have political families become more brazen in promoting their interests than in this year’s elections.  One quickly notes this in the senatorial slates of the two dominant coalitions.  The opposition United Nationalist Alliance … Read more

Surveys and public opinion

For many senatorial candidates who take elections seriously and exert great effort to address the important issues of the day, it must be terribly frustrating to be confronted by the results of preelection surveys. Nothing seems to matter except sheer media exposure and possession of a familiar name in order to score high. The preference … Read more

The continuing tragedy of a divided country

To the generation of Filipinos who went through the horrors of World War II, the Korean War (1950-1953) signaled the advent of another global war that had to be stopped before it could spread any further. On this understanding, the Philippines sent 7,500 of its soldiers to fight in the Korean civil war on the … Read more