Explaining Policy Outcomes in the Philippines: Is the President Too Strong, or Is Congress?
Who influences policy outcomes in the Philippines? While most analysts agree that the quality of policymaking has been poor, they offer two very different explanations. Some blame a too-strong presidency: Presidents keep personal control over policy, so policies change when one president succeeds another. Discontinuity undermines performance. Other observers blame the power of congress: Legislators have stymied presidential agendas for reform, while presidents have been powerless to stop congress from failing to act or from acting to undermine reform. Takeshi Kawanaka takes a different approach. He argues that while presidents have control of fiscal policy, congress is dominant when it comes to ordinary legislation. It is the allocation not the concentration of power that facilitates short-sighted pork-barrel politics and inhibits the growth of cohesive and disciplined political parties.
Takeshi Kawanaka, a visiting scholar in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has written mainly on Philippine politics. After two years of field work on local governance and political machines, he wrote Power in a Philippine City (2002). More recently he edited The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (2005, in Japanese), which deals with the interaction between democratic consolidation and economic liberalization. His current research is on the role of political institutions in shaping policy outcomes in new democracies. He received his PhD in political science from Kobe University, and his MA and BA from Waseda University.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Takeshi Kawanaka
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Takeshi Kawanaka is a 2005-06 visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC, and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), Japan. He was a visiting research associate at the University of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998.
Since Kawanaka joined IDE in 1993, he has been working on politics in developing countries. He did field research mainly in the Philippines. He wrote a book on local politics, Power in a Philippine City (Chiba: IDE) and edited a book on post-democratization politics, The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (in Japanese, Chiba: IDE). Now, he works on political institutions and policy outcomes in new democracies.
Kawanaka received BA and MA in Law from Waseda University and a PhD in political science from Kobe University. He taught courses on Southeast Asian Politics at Komazawa University and Seijo University. Aside from Japanese and English, he speaks Tagalog.