Legislative Performance of Party List Groups in the Philippines from 11th to 18th Congresses

The 1987 Philippine Constitution included the party list system as a political measure to encourage more representation in the national legislative body particularly in the House of Representatives. However, the party list system has become a source of controversies and uncertainties which led the groups to make several efforts to stay true to their advocacies and justify their purpose. This paper examined the bills filed by different party list groups from the 11th to the 18th congresses and analyzed the legislative performance of the party list groups. Using a qualitative approach to evaluate public records on house bills filed by party list representatives from 11th to 18th congress, the researcher gained information about the legislative performance of party list representatives based on official public records. The advocacies were culled from the websites of the Party lists, news articles and other information available online. In conclusion, the study was able to determine that number of Republic Acts from the bills related to Party list advocacy/ies consistently increased from the 11th Congress to the 18th Congress. In the 11th Congress, there was only one (1) Republic Act. In contrast, in the 18th Congress, 90 Republic Acts originated from bills related to Party list advocacy/ies. Thus, the percentage of total Republic Acts over house bills authored related to Party list advocacy/ies consistently increased from the 11th Congress to the 18th Congress. In the 11th Congress, this was less than 1%. However, in the 18th Congress, the number reached almost 9%. Moreover, the researcher has observed that the Party list Representatives also authored house bills that were not related to their Party list’s advocacy/ies.