3 of 4 Filipinos ‘satisfied’ with PH democracy

MANILA, Philippines—Three out of four, or 74 percent, of Filipinos are “satisfied” with the way democracy works in the country, results of the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey indicated.

“The record-high (rating) of 74 percent in March 2013 was achieved just before the May 2013 senatorial elections,” the SWS said in a statement released Monday.

The SWS also noted that satisfaction with the way democracy works similarly “rose to peaks” of 70 percent in September 1992, 70 percent in July 1998, and 68 percent in June 2010, and the results were “obviously related to the successful process of the presidential elections of 1992, 1998 and 2010, respectively.”

Conducted from March 19 to March 22 this year, the First Quarter 2013 Social Weather Survey asked respondents whether on the whole, they were “very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not at all satisfied” with the way that democracy works in the Philippines.

Seventy-four percent said they were satisfied, a rating nine points higher than the 65 percent of respondents who said they were satisfied in March 2012.

The SWS said that “satisfaction with the way democracy works exceeded 50 percent in only three out of 30 surveys from October 1999 to June 2009.”  But in June 2010, the satisfaction rating “recovered to 68 percent and has since then stayed above 60 percent.”

The same survey found that a majority, or 59 percent, said that “democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government,” while 21 percent said “under some circumstances, an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one.” Twenty percent, meanwhile, said it did not matter “whether we have a democratic or a nondemocratic regime.”

The March 2013 Social Weather Survey used face-to-face interviews of 1,800 adults and had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 2 percentage points.

Satisfaction with democracy exceeded 50 percent in March 2000 (51 percent), March 2002 (53 percent) and June 2007 (54 percent), SWS data showed. The rating reached a low of 28 percent in November 2003.—Inquirer Research