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By Garry Rodan

When Benigno Aquino III was elected Philippine President in 2010, combating entrenched corruption was uppermost on his projected reform agenda. Hitherto, it has been unclear what the full extent and nature of reform ambitions of his administration might be. The issue has now been forced by ramifications from whistleblowers’ exposure of an alleged US$224 scam involving discretionary funds by Congress representatives. Fallout has already put some prominent Senators in the hot seat, but will deeper and more systemic reforms follow?

A crucial but often overlooked factor shaping prospects for reform in the Philippines, and elsewhere, is contestation over the meaning and purposes of accountability. Accountability means different things to different people. Even authoritarian rulers increasingly lay claim to it. Therefore, whether it is liberal, moral or democratic ideology that exerts greatest reform influence matters greatly.

Liberal accountability champions legal, constitutional, and contractual institutions to restrain the ability of state agencies to violate the political authority of the individual. Moral accountability ideologues emphasize how official practices must be guided by a moral code, invoking religious, monarchical ethnic, nationalist, and other externally constituted political authority. Democratic accountability ideologies are premised on the notion that official action at all levels should be subject to sanction, either directly or indirectly, in a manner promoting popular sovereignty.

Anti-corruption movements usually involve coalitions incorporating all three ideologies. However, governments tend to be least responsive to democratic ideologies because their reforms are directed at fundamental power relations. The evolving controversy in the Philippines is likely to again bear this out.

What whistleblowers exposed in July 2013 was an alleged scam masterminded by business figure Janet Lim Napoles. Money was siphoned from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), or ‘pork barrel’ as it is popularly known, providing members of Congress with substantial discretionary project funding.

This funding has been integral to political patronage and corruption in the Philippines, precisely why ruling elites have hitherto resolutely defended PDAF despite many scandals and controversies linked to it.

However, public reaction to this scam was on a massive scale. Social and mass media probing and campaigning combined with the ‘Million People March’ in Manila’s Rizal Park involving a series of protests starting in August 2013. After initially defending PDAF despite his anti-corruption platform, Aquino announced PDAF’s abolition. Subsequently, the Supreme Court reversed three earlier rulings to unanimously declare the PDAF unconstitutional for violating the separation of powers principle.

Then, on 1 April 2014, the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) announced it found probable cause to indict three opposition senators – including the powerful Juan Ponce Enrile, who served as Justice Secretary and Defense Minister under Marcos and Senate President from 2008 until June 2013 – for plunder and multiple counts of graft for kickbacks or commissions channeled through bogus non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

These are the Philippines’ first senatorial indictments for plunder, conviction for which can lead to life imprisonment. Napoles and various state officials and employees of NGOs face similar charges. Aquino’s rhetoric about instituting clean and accountable governance is translating into action. But which ideologies are exerting greatest influence and what are the implications?

Moral ideology influences were evident under Aquino even before the abolition of PDAF through new appointments to enhance the integrity of key institutions. Conchita Morales, selected by the President in mid-2011 as the new Ombudsman, was strongly endorsed by Catholic Church leaders. Aquino also appointed Heidi Mendoza as a commissioner to the Commission of Audit. Mendoza played a vital whistleblower role leading to the resignation of the previous Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and was depicted by the Church as a moral role model for Christians.

However, there have been many episodes in the past where authorities have selectively pruned ‘bad apples,’ but with a focus on those from competing political or economic orchards. Will Aquino this time go beyond appeals to moral ideology and intra-elite combat to progress liberal institutional reform?

The accused senators ask why they have been singled out from 40 named criminally liable following the whistleblowers’ claims, inferring political persecution. Yet if continuing investigations lead to charges against people closer to the administration it would indicate not. In a clear alignment with liberal ideology, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma recently raised expectations of such a change: ‘We are a government of laws, not of men. Let rule of law take its course.’

The jury is still out too on just how substantive the institutional change to the PDAF will prove. The President’s own pork barrel lump sum appropriations in the national budget are unaltered, despite public calls for it too to go. Indeed, some argue the President is now even more powerful a pork dispenser through de facto PDAF concentration in his hands.

PDAF’s abolition is also in a transitional phase with the 2014 budget taking account of existing PDAF commitments. The P25-billion PDAF was directed to the major public funding implementing agencies incorporating these commitments on a line item basis. There is a risk, though, that a precedent has been set for legislators’ pet projects to be negotiated with departmental heads in private rather than scrutinized in the legislature.

Certainly the coalition for change is building. Alongside popular forces, internationally competitive globalized elements of the Philippines bourgeoisie are a growing support base for liberal accountability ideology. Yet longstanding inaction on corruption reflects entrenched power structures inside and outside Congress antithetical to the routine and institutionalized promotion of liberal and, especially, democratic accountability.

Thus, while the instigation of official action on the pork barrel scam following the whistleblowers’ actions is testimony to the power of public mobilizations and campaigns, there are serious obstacles to more effective accountability institutionalization promoting popular sovereignty.

Acute concentrations of wealth and social power in the Philippines not only affect relationships between public officials and some elites, they also fundamentally constrain political competition. Oligarchs enjoy massive electoral resource advantages including the capacity for vote buying and other questionable campaign strategies. Outright intimidation, including extrajudicial killings of some of the most concerted opponents of elite rule and vested interests, remains widespread.

Therefore, parallel with popular anti-pork demands is yet another push for Congress to pass enabling law to finally give effect to the provision in the 1987 Constitution to ban political dynasties. The proliferation of political dynasties and corruption has been mutually reinforcing. Congressional dominance by wealthy elites and political clans shapes the laws overseen by officials, the appointment of those officials and, in turn, the culture and practices of public institutions.

When Congress resumes sessions in May, it will have before it the first Anti-Dynasty Bill to have passed the committee level. Public mood has made it more difficult for the rich and powerful in Congress to be as dismissive as previously of such reform attempts. The prospects of the current Bill passing are nevertheless dim but the struggle for democratic accountability will continue.

Garry Rodan is Professor of Politics & International Studies at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia and the co-author (with Caroline Hughes) of The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia: The Dominance of Moral Ideologies.

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By Sara B Hobolt and James Tilley

During November 2012 hundreds of thousands of people across Europe took to the streets. The protesters were, by and large, complaining about government policies that increased taxes and lowered government spending. This initially sounds like a familiar story of popular protests against government austerity programmes, but there is a twist to the tale. Many of the people protesting were not aiming their ire at the national governments making the cuts in spending, but rather at the European Union. In Portugal, people carried effigies of their prime minister on strings and claimed he was a ‘puppet of the EU’; in Greece people burned the EU flag and shouted ‘EU out’; and in Italy people threw stones at the European Parliament offices. It was, at least for some people on the streets, not the incumbent national politicians in Lisbon, Athens, and Rome who were to blame for the problem of the day, but rather politicians and bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Brussels.

The economic crisis in Europe has illustrated that citizens are increasingly blaming not just their national governments, but also ‘Europe’ for their woes. This raises the question of whether citizens can hold European politicians to account for the outcomes for which they are thought to be responsible. The notion of democratic accountability relies on the critical assumption that voters are able to assign responsibility for policy decisions and outcomes, and sanction the government in elections if it is responsible for outcomes not seen to be ‘in their best interest’. This process, however, is clearly complicated in the multilevel system of the European Union where responsibility is not only dispersed across multiple levels of government, but there are also multiple mechanisms for sanctioning governments.

Democratic accountability in multilevel systems can be viewed as a two-step process, where specific requirements need to be met at each step to allow voters to hold governments to account. The first step is one where voters decide which level of government, if any, is responsible for specific policy outcomes and decisions. This depends on the clarity of institutional divisions of powers across levels of government, and the information available about the responsibilities of these divisions. The second step is one where voters should be able to sanction the government in an election on the basis of performance. This depends on government clarity: that is the ability of voters to identify a cohesive political actor that they can sanction accordingly.

Both of these steps are important. Assignment of responsibility to a particular level of government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to punish an incumbent at the polls. To do so, voters also need to know which party or individual to vote for or against. Yet, the EU lacks a clear and identifiable government. Executive power is shared between the European Council and the European Commission, and legislative power is shared between the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. The primary mechanism through which citizens can hold EU institutions to account is via elections to the European Parliament. Unlike in national parliamentary systems, the majority in the European Parliament does not ‘elect’ the EU executive, however. Despite the formal powers of the European Parliament over the approval and dismissal of the European Commission there is only a tenuous link between the political majority in the Parliament and the policies of the Commission, not least since there is no clear government-opposition division in the Parliament. Despite current attempts to present rival candidates for the post of Commission president prior to the European Parliament elections in May, there is still no competition between candidates with competing policy agendas and different records at the EU level. Without this kind of politicised contest it is simply not possible for voters to identify which parties are responsible for the current policy outcomes and which parties offer an alternative.

As a consequence, the classic model of electoral accountability cannot be applied to European Parliament elections. Even if citizens think the EU is responsible for poor policy performance in an area, they find it difficult to identify which parties are ‘governing’ and punish, or reward, them at the ballot box. This has broader implications for trust and legitimacy. When people hold the EU responsible for poor performance, but cannot hold it accountable for that performance, they become less trusting of the EU institutions as a whole. Thus the danger for the EU is that every time the system fails to deliver — such as during the Eurozone crisis — the result is declining levels of trust and a crisis of confidence in the regime as a whole, because voters lack the opportunity to punish an incumbent and elect an alternative. In other words, the lack of mechanisms to hold EU policymakers to account may lead to a more fundamental legitimacy crisis in the European Union.

Sara Hobolt and James Tilley are co-authors of Blaming Europe? Responsibility without accountability in the European Union. Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. James Tilley is a university lecturer at the Department of Politics and International m Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

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Do your writing first!

Leave the dishes and your exercise routine and everything else–and just write. Haven’t we all heard that advice a hundred times?

I have–but it’s something I still struggle with after thirty years of writing.

Don’t feel like less of a writer if this describes you too. Just admit it–and find a way to deal with it.

Here’s my own plan…

The First 2013 Challenge

Along with a good number of you, I joined the “31 Minutes for 31 Days: the Challenge” at the beginning of January. So far, I’ve written 19 out of the 21 days. While not a perfect score, it’s much better than I’ve done for months!

Accountability, thy name is Sherryl!

What happens when the 31-Day Challenge is over? I’ll be ready!

My writer friend, Sherryl Clark, will be my accountability person as we encourage each other to pursue our goals. On January 28, we are beginning a 28-day challenge that includes (1) writing first and (2) staying off-line until the day’s writing is done. And we’re supposed to confront (nicely) when our partner isn’t keeping her commitment.

Why the need for such accountability?

At first glance, it wouldn’t seem necessary. We both have detailed written goals, put in lots of work hours, and truly LOVE to write. Even so, we weren’t getting enough writing done on our own projects. (We wrote for others, critiqued, reviewed, taught, and blogged–but by the time we got around to our own books, we were too tired.)

Ready, Set, Go!

So, we made a deal, Sherryl and I. We have committed to writing first thing each morning on our own projects.

I’m aiming for a minimum of an hour daily. If I can do more, great, but however much I get written, I’ve promised to spend time on my book writing first.

When we’re done, we’ll email each other to say how long we wrote. It won’t take us long to send that email, but since I’ll know Sherryl is waiting for my report, I bet I get the writing done.

Plan Ahead!

It’s on my schedule first now. And I’m planning ahead for success.

I take time before I quit each day to set up my desk with all the materials I’ll need to get started right away in the morning.

One iron-clad rule I plan to stick to: absolutely NO Internet until the writing is done.

Do YOU write first thing each morning, before you get caught up in the day’s demands? If so, what are the tricks YOU use to make it work?

This is a guest post by Steph Auteri.

How many of you are wearing slippers right now? Let me get a show of hands. How many of you rolled out of bed at 9 a.m. or later? How many of you are nursing your first cup of coffee, torn between writing that blog post, playing Spider Solitaire, or seeing what’s on the DVR queue? (Me.)

When I first started freelancing full-time, I struggled with my motivation levels. I wore fuzzy, Cookie Monster pajama pants 24/7. I watched all-day America’s Next Top Model marathons and, when it came to a decision between Spider Solitaire and work, the card game won every time.

Five years later, I have a much better grip on things. After going through a period in which I never stopped working, I’ve settled into something that looks a lot like success, coupled with a healthy work/life balance. What was missing before? Accountability.

My motivation and accountability come from my writing partner, who sends me threatening emails every week. But there are so many ways to find that same sense of accountability. So where can you go to ensure that your writing goals are met, thanks to a mix of motivation, camaraderie, and abject fear?

1. Month-Long Writer Participation Events

Fiction writers have NaNoWriMo, during which they can go all in on that large project they’ve been daydreaming about for eons, a built-in support network (and hard-core accountability) just an email or dedicated forum away. For bloggers, there’s NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. (Both are in November.) Or there’s Michelle Rafter’s annual WordCount Blogathon, in May. And those are just the more well-known ones. You can search for blog carnivals within your specific niche at this handy-dandy online directory.

2. Professional Organizations

Once upon a time, I was a member of Freelance Success (FLX). One of my highest periods of productivity ever was during their twice-a-year Query Challenge. Participants were split into teams and pitted against each other, earning points through queries and LOIs, and through the assignments that resulted from them. Team members had to report their points once a week, and team rankings were sent out in the weekly e-newsletter.

There’s nothing like some healthy competition (and the fear of letting your teammates down) to make you sweat. Of course, you could also find accountability on the member forums of a variety of professional organizations. I list the benefits of membership in ASJA, EFA, NWU, and others over here.

3. High-Stakes Writing Applications

There are several sites and applications that target your writing productivity, and that can be used year-round. 750 Words is one such resource. It’s a site on which users aim to write at least 750 words a day and, for their troubles, receive points for their progress, and stats about what they’ve written.

Or there’s Write or Die, for those who work best under pressure. It tracks your writing and, if you pause for too long, you either a) receive a gentle reminder pop-up, telling you to stop being such a goddamn slacker (gentle mode), b) are subjected to an “unpleasant sound” that only ceases if you continue writing (n

Edward Zigler is a developmental scientist and a pioneer and leader in the field of applied developmental psychology.  He served on the committee that planned Head Start and was the federal official responsible for the program during the Nixon administration.  Sally J. Styfco is a writer and social policy analyst specializing in issues pertaining to children and families.  Together they wrote, The Hidden History Of Head Start, which looks at this remarkable social program that has served 25 million children and their families since it was established 44 years ago.  We get an insider’s view of the program’s decades of services and an idea of what the future may hold.  In the excerpt below we learn about one of the pitfalls of such a far-reaching social program.

Why had Head Start fallen into such a sorry state between its birth in 1965 and 1970? Two insiders very close to Head Start in the early days, Carolyn Harmon and Ed Hanley (1997), argue that the culprit was an inadequate management system. Head Start employed a “recipient-participant model,” whereas most federal programs employed the “classical accountability model” of management. The classical model emphasizes uniform program design and delivery systems, a structure that lends itself to standard techniques of evaluating success. In the recipient-participant model, the only accountability to the federal government is the satisfaction of grantees and the recipients of the services. As long as local Head Start administrators and participants were satisfied, the program had demonstrated accountability. Harmon and Hanley explain that this model was a barrier to efforts to standardize practices across Head Start centers. They also point out the inevitability of introducing a concrete form of program accountability to justify continued federal support from the Office of Management and Budget and even the friendliest Congress…

Having performance standards and some mechanisms to be sure they were being followed were only the first steps in implementing a new model of accountability. With roots in Community Action, Head Start could not easily give up its federal-to-local management design. Unquestionably there is much stronger financial oversight in the accountability model, where funds go from the federal governments to the states. Each state then gives the money to local sites and is responsible for monitoring them. The states are monitored by the feds. Head Start funds instead go directly from the federal government to local grantees. Oversight of the grantees is the responsibility of the 10 regional offices. However, as originally conceptualized these regional offices were not viewed as watchdogs but as partners with the local sites, helping them to solve problems and function smoothly.

They were not the only federal officials who appeared too lenient with their flock. A short time into my stewardship of Head Start, a financial problem was brought to my attention from the regional office level that made me furious. A local Head Start director (who happened to be a black minister) had been given funds to purchase limber to renovate his Head Start center. Instead he appropriated the lumber and built a house for himself. I had to decide what the Head Start Bureau’s reaction to this malfeasance would be. In the normal world, when thievery takes place the police are called, and the criminal justice system runs its course. I was very angry and wanted to purse the most severe course of

Author: Thad Krasnesky (on JOMB)
Illustrator: David Parkins (on JOMB)
Published: 2009 Flashlight Press (on JOMB)
ISBN: 9780979974649

Cute only gets you so far in the real world. Capturing the glee of victory and the sting of defeat, this hilariously illustrated rhyming book lets us laugh at our own (and our little sibling’s) attempts to prove otherwise.

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• Dusan Petricic
• David Roberts

Pop over to The Boy Reader for today’s full menu of poetry offerings. Poetry Fridays are brought to us by Kelly Herold of Big A, Little A.

HOTLINE VOICES: Cathy Miller, “The Literacy Ambassador”, alerts us about Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes (by Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury).

We’d love to hear your thoughts on a favourite children’s book. Leave a voice message on our JOMB listener hotline, +1-206-350-6487, so we can include your audio in our show.

Do you need to revise something this month? I do! I have a MG novel that I need to go through (again!) and then send it in.

Summer Revision Smackdown: Revision Accountability

So, I’m heading over to Jolie Steckly’s and Holly Cupola’s blogs for their Summer Revision Smackdown (Powered by Licorice, Bum-glue, and You).

It’s easy.
You just post your goals for revising during the month of June.
Then, you report your progress every Friday or Saturday.

That’s it.

The prizes? Besides solid progress toward your revision goal? You need more than that?

Jolie and Holly make promises:

At the end of June, Holly and Jolie will give one Smackdowner THE WHIPLASH AWARD for excellence in revision during the month of June. And that just might come with a cuppa something and your own personal licorice memento.

Hey, I’m in. All except one thing: licorice. I do not like licorice, so I’m donating mine to charity. Any suggestions for a worthy cause?

Post from: Revision Notes Revise Your Novel! Copyright 2009. Darcy Pattison. All Rights Reserved.

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