ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the impact of the colonial era on Philippine political and electoral institutions. The discussion begins by examining how Spanish and United States (US) colonial rule in the Philippines laid the socioeconomic and political foundations for the country’s post-colonial clientelist electoral regime. Compared to the Spanish army’s more limited presence in the form of small, scattered garrisons, the Catholic Church constituted the earliest, most significant institutionalized colonial presence in the islands. The Japanese invasion interrupted both the gradual phasing-out of US colonial rule and the increasing polarization of rural society in Central Luzon, leading instead to the collapse of the country’s Commonwealth regime and its replacement by a military regime with a Filipino puppet government. The opening of the colony had stimulated a rush to accumulate land in general, with members of the Church, colonial officials, the native principalia and Chinese mestizo merchants all bent on acquiring land.
