The UP Third World Studies Center (TWSC) and Sarilaya-Development Workers’ Chapter invite the public to a free lecture titled “𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐬, 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” by Dr. Antoinette R. Raquiza. This lecture is based on a chapter of the same title, first published in the book “The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia.”

𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐄: October 28, 2025 (Tuesday)
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄: 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM
𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐔𝐄: Pilar Herrera Hall, Palma Hall, University of the Philippines Diliman

Register here: https://forms.gle/rGgt5q3fmtPpHbsX6

The Philippine anti-corruption campaign, triggered by the recent exposes on elected officials’ cannibalization of the national budget to the tune of billions of pesos, is gaining steam. Street protests are drawing in greater numbers and becoming more organized with different political groups coalescing around common political calls—a development that follows a distinct roadmap of regime change that emerged with the ouster of the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. regime in 1986, and was successfully replicated in 2001 against President Joseph Estrada. This roadmap that is popularly called EDSA uprising has four main elements: media exposés, street mobilizations, parliamentary proceedings (these days in the form of the filing of impeachment), and military action. The lecture will seek to answer the question: Will today’s anti-corruption campaign lead to regime change? By way of answer, the talk will compare the anti-corruption campaigns that targeted Estrada and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Both campaigns followed the EDSA roadmap but the mobilizations against GMA failed not only to oust her in 2004, but also to serve as a constraint to corruption. Findings of the present study suggests that that different outcomes can be attributed to the campaigns’ institutional settings and political context that Professor Raquiza calls the proprietary polity—a configuration of elite rule in which, because of the lack of robust state institutions, the power of the political leaders derives from their family wealth and social connections while that of the technocrats, mainly recruited by the President from his or her circle of friends, campaign advisers, and allies, are mainly dependent on the appointing authority. In the comparative study of the two cases, all other things (i.e., media exposes, social movement, military action) being equal, it was control over the Lower House and thus the command over the traditional channel of patronage that decided on the fate of Estrada and Macapagal Arroyo. From a proprietary polity perspective, to more fully address corruption, there is a need to strengthen institutional constraints on executive power at the different levels of governance, and set up cross-class alliances to push for institutional reforms, including the building of strong independent political parties.

Antoinette R. Raquiza, PhD is the convenor of the political economy program of the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies and president of the Asia Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, Inc. She earned both her PhD and MA in political science from the City University of New York Graduate Center and taught Southeast Asian and Philippine Development Studies at the UP Diliman Asian Center. Specializing in the political economy of late development, her research interests cover governance and development policies, comparative political institutions, globalization and international political economy, as well as identity politics and conflict studies.