The Congress of the Philippines, like the American one, is divided into two houses. The upper house, like the American one, is elected in a crazy way. It’s a different form of crazy, though. Every three years, half the 24-person Senate is elected at-large, with all the problems that entails. At least now there’s a ballot, instead of having people write in their favorite candidates.
The lower house is elected by a combination of first-past-the-post and proportional representation. The districts are pretty straightforward, although their populations can vary wildly between 1,559,641 people in the 2nd district of Quezon City, with a few as small as 50,000. Why the disparity? First, the constitution mandates that each province receives at least one district. Second, there hasn’t been any redistricting (other than the creation of new provinces) since 1987. The reason for the latter is left as an exercise for the reader.
Dakilang Isagani, Mapa na nagpapakita ng populasyon ng mga distritong pangkonggreso, ayon sa resulta ng bilangang isinagawa noong Agosto 1, 2007 at inilathala noong Abril 2008, Wikimedia Commons.
Voters get to cast a second ballot for a political party. The parties will divvy up 20% of the House seats, with two caveats: to get a seat, a party needs to get at least 2% of the national vote, and no party can receive more than three seats. In the 2010 election, there will be 219 districts and 54 party-list seats. The party-lists are decided by such narrow margins that they don’t release the results until all the precinct votes are in.
The above is an Armed Forces flyer reading, “Don’t vote for the NPA party-lists,” followed by a list of organizations, including one we talked to earlier. One thing that came out of our interviews is that the military seems to target party-list candidates, who are more progressive on average. I wonder if this is a tragic real-world test of the hypotheses (made by many people, but here is a paper by Iversen and Soskice) that proportional representation is better for pro-redistribution candidates. After all, why else would repression be targeted against the candidates that win the PR seats?
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