Chapter Two - Historical Background

Summary

Political institutions such as parliaments have historical antecedents that shape their roles, the role expectations directed towards them by the public, their functions, and their performance. The longer the history of representative institutions of a country, the greater the chances that democracy as a form of government has taken root in society. While many of the currently established democracies may have started as democracies without democrats, their consolidation and deepening depends not only on elite support for democracy but also on the acceptance of democracy by the masses, and accordingly on the evolution of a civic mass culture. As this chapter will show, the history of legislative bodies varies considerably in the five countries discussed in this volume.

In India and the Philippines, modern legislative bodies based on the principle of representation can be traced back as far as the late 19th and early 20th century. The legitimacy of these legislatures, however, was limited as, under the colonial regime, initially only a miniscule segment of the native population was represented in these bodies, which were elected on the basis of linguistic, literacy, and property qualifications (Caoili 1989a, p. 3). Likewise detrimental to their legitimacy was the fact that they were established by the colonial masters as part of a divide-and-rule strategy with the ultimate objective of weakening the fledgling nationalist movements by a token of concessions. In India and the Philippines, the British and American colonizers gradually repealed and democratized discriminating electoral laws, extended the competences of legislators and eventually granted self-rule status to these colonies. Still, only a minority of the adult population was entitled to vote. In the Philippines, for example, only about 14 per cent of the adult native population was qualified to vote in the 1930s (Anderson 1996, p. 21). In those parts of India which were under the direct rule of the British, this percentage was slightly higher, at around 20 per cent (Rösel and J ü rgenmeyer 2002a, p. 51).