Vote-buying as a way of life in PH

In 2017, we feared losing my 15-year-old nephew to a very rare neurological disease. The nearest local hospitals in our province couldn’t provide us the reason behind his severe headache and vomiting. In one of the biggest hospitals in Metro Manila, we got answers but at a steep cost: more than P100,000 for an angiogram procedure.

It was an extremely difficult time for my nephew’s family, having just lost the father to cancer. My nephew’s condition is like a ticking bomb, and he was advised to undergo a very expensive medical procedure from a private hospital. We were asked to prepare almost P1-million pesos for it.

The next scenarios are familiar to a lot of poor and working-class families in the country. The family had no choice but look for sponsors to shoulder such a huge amount to save my nephew’s life. The family eventually met a local nongovernment organization (NGO) that prides itself in helping the poor and disadvantaged in our municipality by connecting those in need to politicians and party list groups for financial assistance.

Banking on what the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu calls “social capital,” the group leaders find ways to solicit monetary and nonmonetary aid from politicians and government agencies by talking to their “contacts” inside those agencies. In return, the group offers full support to their donors and sponsors.

In one of my conversations with one of the NGO leaders, I was told that many Filipinos in need of medical assistance must be guided on where to go so they can get the help they need. With confidence, the leader assured me that the government has a lot of money allocated for medical assistance every year, but the supposed beneficiaries are being kept uninformed by those in power. This is where their role as “bridge” between people in need and elected politicians comes in.

I was amazed by how this NGO can navigate the layers of informal procedures and government bureaucracy to ask for medical assistance by talking to their network of insider friends or acquaintances in some local and national government agencies. I personally witnessed how, in the process of requesting for financial assistance, the amounts already set aside for a particular beneficiary can still be subjected to negotiations and bargaining. It all depends on the political capital of the recommending politicians.

The group, established in February 2022, now has more than 60,000 members and volunteers all over the country. Their network of politicians and private donors are still expanding, and the group aims to become a national organization in the years to come.

I don’t think that this reality of everyday life in Philippine politics is well captured in popular discourse when we talk about electoral reforms and “voters’ education.” We should drop the use of this quoted phrase because the discourse on voters’ education assumes that our voters are not educated enough to understand electoral politics. In the case of the thousands, or even millions of Filipinos in dire need of financial assistance for medical care including my nephew, the last thing they want is for us to teach them how to intelligently pick a better leader for the nation.

The way we collectively define who is a better candidate and who is not is simply not the same for everyone. And no amount of voter’s education is effective for a family struggling to survive. Because our traditional politicians are aware of this, they use this very weakness in our social system to further strengthen their political capital, and eventually, their grip on power. Politicians also construct social problems, not in a sense of personally creating them, but because they deliberately allow them to persist so they can present themselves as saviors who can solve those problems. A problem to some is a benefit to others; it augments the latter’s group influence, according to political scholar Murray Edelman in his 1988 work, “Constructing the Political Spectacle.”

When we talk about vote-buying during elections, we are merely scratching the surface of a much bigger problem. This neglect could account for our persistent problems of political backwardness and immaturity. Vote-buying doesn’t only occur when politicians offer an amount or favor to the electorate so they can win their votes during election day. Vote-buying happens, and more insidiously, when politicians offer hope to those fighting to survive. Alas, vote-buying has become a way of life in a developing country like ours.

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Dr. Ricky R. Rosales is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Sociology, and news anchor for Teleradyo Serbisyo and Radyo 630.