THE POLITICAL terrain keeps the local chief executive in a precarious position because s/he finds her/himself positioned in a complex web of power relations, Pinoy style. This has to do with the impoverished majority's state of disempowerment and the minority's need to maintain its grip on the population. Our democracy is founded on the simple fact that anyone who wants to win a post in government has to win votes. These votes are won from the majority of the people who live on the fringes of society and are often unable to access resources for their own survival.

	THE poor are those whose ways of life and systems of understanding are excluded from mainstream political discourse and activity, whether it is politics of the left or the right or the middle.

Although the situation of the poor is complex, at heart they are the people whose ways of life and systems of understanding are excluded from mainstream political discourse and activity, whether it is politics of the left or the right or the middle. These are the people who do not understand the need for contracts and accounting systems between townmates, since the dangal (honor) and reciprocal utang-na-loob (debt of obligation) practices are more familiar and binding. These are the citizens who do not prosper in the systems imposed on them from above, because their ways of life have been rendered ineffective and ignorant by social systems that dominate even their world.

To understand how they think and feel with regard to politicians and politics, we have to try to imagine how their lives are. Imagine that you are a farmer in a municipality of Albay where your fields are flooded during the rainy season and completely dry during the summer. The government is no help to you because agricultural officers can only advice you to use high cost, foreign inputs that only result in social and material debt. Nothing can be done about what you really need — i.e. irrigation and flood control — since both national and local government units claim that they lack funds.

On top of this, stiff foreign competition is driving the price of your produce down so that you cannot pay the loans incurred for inputs. Considering that this is a yearly problem, every year you sink deeper into debt and four months out of 12 your family is hungry. You cannot do anything to improve your life because you do not know what controls the prices of inputs and outputs, you do not know how to influence your government to the point of positive and effective action, and you do not know how to — and neither are you interested in — seizing control of government so that it is more responsive to you.

This is how it is to be disempowered. Everything happens in your world without your influence and you can do nothing to improve your life because you do not have the resources to effect change. But you do see people around you who are bridges to the resources that could, at the very least, stave off starvation.

Usually these bridges are the local government officials. They are the bridges to resources otherwise inaccessible to the poor. Thus it is important to be close enough to one of these officials so that they can include you in poverty-alleviation programs, alert you to projects, give you money for funerals, and even get you a job.

THIS IS why a confidential employee of a Bataan mayor says that by five a.m., a queue of people has formed in front of the mayor's house. By the time there is no one left in the line, it is already dusk. All of those who were in the queue had requests for such things as assistance for funerals and petitions for jobs.

It gets no better in the cities. According to barangay officials in four Quezon City barangays, people come to them for everything, from loans for the day's marketing to the pots for cooking their food.

These stories are repeated elsewhere in this country. This is because one of the few sources of resources for the poor is the government official who can either directly dole out resources or who can open doors to offices that hold these resources. Local officials from the barangay captain to the governor are captive to the demands of the poor because if the poor electorate does not perceive the official to be an effective bridge to resources, then they will not be elected into office — unless of course votes are bought with guns and goons.

This is one side of the so-called patronage system that we often miss: the local officials are under pressure to prove that they are an effective bridge to resources. That is why they are so obsessed with projects delivery even if these do not contribute to genuine development. What matters is that they can deliver.

But there is another aspect of the political landscape that begs consideration: the demands of national officials who often have greater access to greater resources. These officials have their own demands from local officials. More often than not, local officials are the guarantors of votes or support. This means that a presidential aspirant must have a network of governors, mayors, barangay captains, and purok leaders, all bound in a pyramid of vote delivery.

This is what most politicians mean by an electoral machinery: Candidates have a series of ward leaders from the ground upward who can promise the votes of the people under their jurisdiction. The more of these ward leaders the aspirant to office controls, the greater their chances of winning. Local government officials who can prove themselves reliable at vote delivery are most in the favor of higher officials who control national, provincial, or municipal resources.

Thus, we see how a local government official stands sandwiched between two layers of accountability: to the people for the delivery of much needed resources and to the higher level government politicos for the delivery of support, which during elections translates to votes and during non-election times translates to other forms of support such as the attendance in rallies. (A fuller explanation of this theory can be found in Agustin Rodriguez's paper on "Grassroot Governance" published in Social Science Information in 2003.)

Here we see how the performance of the local official, especially the local chief executive, is measured by demands other than those of administration and good governance. In such a scenario, the local chief executive and the officials under her/him are concerned with resource and vote delivery and that takes time away from actual administration.