You are cordially invited to a special seminar by Ronald D. Holmes. The details are as follows.

Title: Pork Barreling in the Philippines after the 1986 Political Transition

Speaker: Ronald D. Holmes, the president of Pulse Asia Research Inc. and Assistant Professor, the Department of Political Science at De La Salle University

Date & Time: January 24th (Tues.), 2017, 16:00 – 18:00

Place: Tonan Tei, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Moderator: Hau Caroline, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Why do Philippine presidents, with strong constitutional powers, continue to engage in particularistic spending? This is the central question that this study addresses. The study explores the reasons behind the president’s submission to particularistic demand by examining the practice of pork barreling. In existence for close to a century after it was first introduced through a separate public works act in the 1920s, the practice has been sustained despite all the controversies and scandals it has spawned. The study gives specific attention to the forms of pork barreling from the 1986 political transition in the Philippines. With the expectation that the post-EDSA administration would veer away from the excessive particularistic spending of prior administrations, taking lessons from the enormous predation that took place under Marcos, the sustenance of the practice from Cory Aquino to the Noynoy Aquino administration suggests that pork, more specifically the constituency development fund (previously referred to as the Countrywide Development Fund and later renamed as the Priority Development Assistance Fund), suggests that it is essential for the president to push an administrative agenda or secure its political survival. Across the post-EDSA administrations, pork barreling thus appears to be a transaction between the constitutionally powerful president to secure the temporal support of parochial and re-election oriented legislators.

About the speaker:
Ronald D. Holmes has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science at De La Salle University since January 1985. He has also been an active member of the Philippine social science community serving as three-time president of the Philippine Political Science Association; twice as Chair of the Philippine Social Science Council; and as member and Chair of the Technical Panel on the Social Sciences and Communications of the Commission on Higher Education. He is also the president of the research organization, Pulse Asia Research Inc. He is currently completing his Ph.D. with the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.