PARTY-list elections have taken place in this country seven times in the last 21 years, but I have supported only three parties so far. Of the three, only one has made it to the list of groups the Commission on Elections (Comelec) allowed to run this year. This simplifies my selection process a lot.
How do you plan to choose one out of the 134 party-list groups competing for your vote? Will you examine the track records of all 46 groups that won party-list seats in the House of Representatives in 2016? I tried doing that and was struck by how specific some of these parties’ special interests can get. One party, for instance, seems to have dedicated itself to eye care. What about the cerebrum or the liver? Are they better represented and less marginalized? It turns out that Ang Mata’y Alagaan (Mata)—which gained one seat in 2016, with 331,285 votes—has committed itself to fighting for better conditions for persons with disabilities, and not just for better eyesight.
What makes Mata more striking is that it was among the party-list groups that benefited from the Supreme Court’s generosity in 2013. Before May 2013, the Comelec tried to exclude 52 groups from the party-list elections. It listed various reasons, of which two stood out. It excluded groups that did not represent “marginalized or underrepresented sectors” as defined in the party-list law. It also excluded groups that had failed to show a track record of working for the truly marginalized.
And it seemed Comelec was on to something. Why should parties serve in the House of Representatives when the groups they claimed to represent—artists, savings and loan associations, Ilonggos, homeowners’ associations, Bicolanos and Marcos loyalists, among others—were not marginal at all?
But the Court ruled in April 2013 that the party-list system was never meant to be exclusive to sectoral parties with “special interests and concerns.” Nor did the law require national or regional parties to represent the marginalized. All they had to do, the Court said, was “advocate the same ideology or platform, or the same governance principles and policies, regardless of their economic status as citizens.” Which is part of the reason Mata, in 2016, won a seat that the daughter of a Supreme Court associate justice (now retired) filled. Visionary, no?
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Mata and a group of new parties joined a handful of groups that had often done well in the party-list elections. Since 2007, these groups have always won at least one party-list seat: A Teacher, Akbayan, An Waray, Anak Mindanao or Amin, Bayan Muna, Buhay, Citizens’ Battle Against Corruption, Coop-Natcco, You Against Corruption and Poverty or Yacap.
But when the field expanded in 2016, four of these groups won fewer votes that year than they did in the 2007 elections. Buhay, for example, topped the elections in 2007 and 2013, and always landed in the top four since 2004. In 2016, it placed ninth.
Interest in the party-list elections grew fast. Here’s one way we know that: from 2004 to 2016, the overall voter turnout increased by 11.03 million persons. The party-list election turnout in the same period grew by 19.65 million more voters.
The 1987 Constitution reserves one-fifth of all seats in the House of Representatives for party-list lawmakers. “Simply put,” the Court said in 2013, “the party-list system is intended to democratize political power by giving political parties that cannot win in legislative district elections a chance to win seats” in the Lower House. It was supposed to keep Congress from remaining a plutocracy. Have we succeeded? Has this increased interest led to better legislation through the party-list system? That, dear reader, is the 64-million-voter question.