Dysfunctional

On Monday, I will vote for a party-list group for the very first time.

I had avoided voting for any party-list group in the previous elections as a matter of conviction. I had always felt that the design for party-list representation — among other flaws in the 1987 Constitution — was hare-brained.

I still do. But further down, let me try to explain my decision to end my boycott of party-list representation.

Before that, let me explain why I think the design for party-list representation is hare-brained.

Proportional representation in a parliamentary setting I can understand. But party-list representation is an entirely different animal, introduced by the framers of the 1987 Constitution in anticipation of a shift to parliamentary system of government. By one swing vote, the shift did not happen, the presidential system was retained and nobody remembered to take out that crazy provision about party-list representation.

Proportional representation in a parliamentary setting awards additional seats to the political parties based on their aggregate share of the national vote. It is a means to mitigate whatever imperfections there might be in purely district-based representation — such as when local parties are certain to control "safe districts" and acquire seats disproportional to their share of national opinion.

Proportional representation strengthens the party system, especially in instances where some parties might enjoy broad national support but not enough "safe districts" to adequately represent majority opinion in parliament. The party-list system, on the other hand, undermines the political party system by enabling fly-by-night groups to break into the political arena and diffuse national opinion.

That is particularly true in the case we have, where a party-list system is anomalously installed in a presidential form of government. It aggravates the makeshift nature of our party system and makes political party development a completely futile task.

Proportional representation aids the preponderance of mainstream opinion. Our party-list system, by magnifying micro-constituencies, completely undermines the role of a political party system to crystallize options of the national community and consolidate the constituencies for those options. It sabotages the critical function of elections as occasions for national consensus-building.

The party-list concept is a wooly extract from the lame "affirmative action" orthodoxy popular during the 1970s. It is supposed to enable representation for the "marginalized" and the "disadvantaged" in society.

"Marginalized" and "disadvantaged" are perilously loose concepts native to the ideologies of victimhood popular a generation ago. They open large doors to demagogues and rabble-rousers who mobilize rage on the basis of some imagined (and magnified) grievance.

The ideologies of victimhood basically try to convince those who fail to blame those who succeed. They urge imagined minorities to use the political system to persecute majorities. They agitate the frustrated to pin the blame on the satisfied — and by their own infirmities claim special entitlements from the rest of us who work hard to succeed. It encourages underachievers to blame the gap on the achievers.

This system aggravates the basic ideological stupidity of populism: blame the rich for the income gap.

There is a fundamental anti-democratic streak in all the ideologies of victimhood.

In the parlance of political science, electoral democracy is supposed to accomplish "interest-aggregation". That means that the contending parties ought to weave together comprehensive programs to bring diverse interests in society together to work for a shared common course of action. "Interest aggregation" enables government to take a longer view and not succumb to the incoherence of special interests, transient sentiments and short-sighted opinions in a complex community.

The design of our party-list system works diametrically opposed to the strategic goal of "interest-aggregation" that functional electoral democracy is supposed to achieve. Instead of enabling differentiated communities to win the challenge of assembling a unified long-term view, it installs short-sighted groupings, factions of special interest and single-item agenda like barricades in the main avenue of national vision-setting: the legislature.

The Supreme Court, in its ruling on the case against Richard Gomez and MAD a few years ago, further deepened the basic design flaw in our party-list system. It said that not only should party-list groups speak on behalf of the "marginalized", the actual representative should be "marginalized" himself.

Think about it hard enough and the absurdity of its long conclusion should be evident: to represent the infirm (say, the deaf and dumb), the actual infirm person ought to be seated in Congress. But what will that person do there?

On the basis of that ruling, the greedy leftist groups now want every other apparently more mainstream party list groups be banned from participating — which will guarantee their monopoly of these seats. Although the leftist party list groups seat professional agitators, aristocrats of the protest industry and career detainees to represent their claim to speaking for the "disadvantaged", they object to people like Raul Lambino of Sigaw ng Bayan fame (and now of Banat) or Gen. Palparan of Bantay sitting in to represent their particular version of the disadvantaged.

Which brings me to my reason for casting a party-list vote this time around: since this dysfunctional system of representation is there anyway, the only way to lessen its dysfunctionality is to elect the exact opposites of the leftist groups who are monopolizing the seats and trapping all of us in their conflict-inducing version of "marginalization."

For this reason, I have pared down my probable choice to three: ANAD, Bantay and Banat.