Should we go parliamentary and federal?

With the increasing clamor for the parliamentary and federal form of government, it is important to note the essential features of these structural solutions to governance.

Parliamentary and federal are not synonymous. A parliamentary form refers to how the head of State or the Prime Minister is elected, that is, by members of Parliament (the equivalent of our congressmen). Also, the Prime Minister’s Cabinet (or Secretaries) will come from Parliament. Hence, there is a fusion of the executive and legislative branches of government.

The federal system refers to the autonomy of lower levels of government which can be called states or regions. The idea is for the states to govern themselves, take care of their finances, determine how to collect and spend their funds, appoint their staff, run their programs, implement projects, and so on.

The parliamentary system looks good considering the problems and deadlocks we are having in passing national legislation with two houses comprising congress (the senators and the congressmen). We have tested it before under the Marcos regime with a Batasang Pambansa. We can introduce improvements based on that experience.

The federal system will be new to us. It could be problematic and disadvantageous to regions which are not getting much revenues as the others (e.g. Eastern Visayas vis-à-vis the National Capital Region).

In a federal system, some taxes are collected by the national government, others by the state government. The system must put in place a way of distributing funds from the national government to the regions with lower revenues. This sharing scheme could be the way to making the system work.

If this is not done, the underdeveloped regions will be left behind by the rich and very developed regions. But getting at a “fair” system would be very difficult because the “rich” regions will resist it and if these are the regions with more members in parliament, then “poor” regions like us could be at the loosing end. Thus, retaining a Senate in a federal system is also being proposed. Having this would however, not solve the frequent delay and other problems in legislative action.

The debates leading to the final decision on what system to adopt should be very informative. We should understand the details of these proposals before making our choice.