ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the theoretical background to the study, beginning with an overview of the main contending views of regime transition and democratization in the literature. The relationship between landlord-patron and peasant-client has long been considered by Philippine scholars to be a basic building block of the country’s national political system, though analysts disagree about the meaning and purpose of this relationship for democracy. In doing so, contemporary procedural approaches to democratization usually end up taking democracy’s other minimum conditions for granted and ignoring the problem of persistent exclusionary electoral practices. In addition to Huntington’s internationally driven analysis, as well as other “globalist” accounts, other major contending explanations of regime change and democratization also emphasize national electoral competition as the “procedural minimum” for democracy as well. Despite their diversity, none of the contemporary procedural approaches addresses the analytically distinct problem of how the competitive electorate is expanded to include the entire citizenry, considered here to be a minimum condition for democracy.
