The only book length study to cover the Philippines after Marco's downfall, this key title thematically explores issues affecting this fascinating country, throughout the last century. Appealing to both the academic and non academic reader, topics covered include: national level electoral politics economic growth the Philippine Chinese law and order opposition the Left local and ethnic politics.

Philippine political history, especially in the twentieth century, challenges the image of democratic evolution as serving the people, and does so in ways that reveal inadequately explored aspects of many democracies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century the Philippines has nonetheless shown gradual socioeconomic "progress". This book provides an interpretive overview of Philippine politics, and takes full account of the importance of patriotic Philippine factors in making decisions about future political policies. It analyses whether regional and local politics have more importance than national politics in the Philippines. Discussing cultural traditions of patronism, it also examines how clan feuds localize the state and create strong local policies. These conflicts in turn make regional and family-run polities collectively stronger than the central state institution. The book goes on to explore elections in the Philippines, and in particular the ways in which politicians win democratic elections, the institutionalized role of public money in this process, and the role that media plays. Offering a new interpretive overview of Philippine progress over many decades, the author notes recent economic and political changes during the current century while also trying to advance ideas that might prove useful to Filipinos. Presenting an in-depth analysis of the problems and possibilities of politics and society in the Philippines, the book will be of interest to those researching Southeast Asian Politics, Political History and Asian Society and Culture.

Invidious distinctions on the basis of race and overt racism were central features in American colonial policy in the Philippines from 1898 to 1947, as America transported its domestic racial policy to the island colony. This collection by young Filipino scholars analyzes American colonialism and its impact on administration and attitudes in the Philippines through the prism of American racial tradition, a structural concept which refers to beliefs, attitudes, images, classifications, laws, and social customs that shape race relations and racial formation in multiracial and colonial societies. The dominance of this tradition was manifested in the wanton prerogatives of the U.S. Congress and others who helped to carry out colonial policy in the region. The Spanish flexible racial tradition had resulted in a system based on ethnicity and class as determinants of social and economic structure, while the rigid U.S. racial tradition assigned race the more dominant role. The cultural affinity between the early individual American administrators and the Filipino elite, however, meant that class-based distinctions in the islands were not broken up. Thus, the extreme elitist character of the Philippines' economy and society persisted and became impervious to the influences which in other Asian countries led to a progressive weakening of elite structures as the 20th century advanced.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this path breaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines. Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war, U.S. colonialists, in dialogue with Filipino elites, divided the Philippine population into ''civilized'' Christians and ''savage'' animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their ''capacities.'' The latter were governed first by Americans, then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the ''white man's burden.'' Ultimately, however, this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies, even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.

Focusing on a rice farming village in central Luzon, Kerkvliet argues that the faction and patron-client relationships dealt with by conventional studies are only one part of Philippine political life.

This thoughtful book explores the enduring tensions between state and society in the Philippines by tracing its history of state formation and the corresponding conflicts and collaborations between state leaders and social forces. One horn of the dilemma is the persistent inability of the state to provide basic services, guarantee peace and order, and foster economic development. The other is Filipinos' equally enduring suspicion of a strong state. The authors explore the development of institutional weakness and ineffectual governance, explain the tension between state centralization and local power, and address major issues of government reform, communist and Islamic resistance to the state, population growth and economic crisis, and the growing Filipino labor diaspora. They focus on how the state has shaped and been shaped by its interaction with social forces, especially in the rituals of popular mobilization that have produced surprising and diverse political results.

Extricating liberalism from the haze of anti-modernist and anti-European caricature, this book traces the role of liberal philosophy in the building of a new nation. It examines the role of toleration, rights, and mediation in the postcolony. Through the biographies of four Filipino scholar-bureaucrats—Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez—Lisandro E. Claudio argues that liberal thought served as the grammar of Filipino democracy in the 20th century. By looking at various articulations of liberalism in pedagogy, international affairs, economics, and literature, Claudio not only narrates an obscured history of the Philippine state, he also argues for a new liberalism rooted in the postcolonial experience, a timely intervention considering current developments in politics in Southeast Asia.