Lawyer Grace Agcaoili (left), chief of the Social Policy and Local Development Section of UNICEF Philippines, answers questions from participants of the 2013 Pinoy Youth Barometer Conference Friday. Also with Agcaoili is Kabataan partylist representative James Terry Ridon (center) and Undersecretary Leon Flores III (right), chairman and CEO of the National Youth Commission. Matikas Santos/INQUIRER.net
MANILA, Philippines – Last names and television advertisements of candidates, instead of their platforms and stand on issues, were the major factors for the youth when they voted in the previous 2013 May midterm elections.
“A quarter of sampled [college] students indicated that their votes were influenced by the candidates last name,” according to the 2013 Pinoy Youth Barometer study conducted by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Policy Center.
The study, which was conducted last March 2013 and had a mock balloting, also noted that 28.13 percent of the sampled students voted on the basis of candidates’ television ads.
“Only two percent of the respondents based their vote on the platforms of the 12 senatorial candidates,” the study titled 2013 Pinoy Youth Barometer found.
The students in the two percent, however, had “very misguided assumptions regarding what constitutes a platform,” David Yap II, an economist of the AIM Policy Center, told INQUIRER.net in an interview at the sidelines of the launch of the study Friday.
“Students cited a motherhood statement like they will vote for a particular candidate because of his platform, [but] when asked what kind of platform [they were] talking about, they said things like ‘education,’ ‘health,’ and ‘womens’ rights.’” Yap said.
“It wasn’t really the idea of a platform in the strictest sense of the word,” Yap said.
The students had to resort to other standards in choosing their candidates because there wasn’t any clear ideology that the candidates were representing, Yap said.
“We were led to believe that it is possible that a lot of the students are basing their choices on television ads, personality, or their last name simply because they couldn’t find anything to believe in, they couldn’t latch on to a specific ideology,” he said.
“Another hypothesis which is complementary to the [first] hypothesis is that they couldn’t find any substantial difference between the supposed platform [and] supposed campaign of different candidates,” Yap said.
The campaign of the candidates could be partly to blame because they had seldom discussed core issues or their specific stands on issues.
Many campaign rallies had simply degenerated into pageants or shows, Yap pointed out.
“What do these politicians do, they engage in sorties [but] do they talk about issues? For a couple of minutes they do, but then it rapidly devolves into a pageant, they bring out dancers, they sing, they dance, they make a show out of it,” he said.
“They pander to the masses, they pander to voters, but they don’t really discuss the issues that matter in any substantive manner,” Yap said. “So at the end of the day if you’re a voter and these are the kinds of choices [before] you, what kind of standards are left for you to use?”
Young voters could no longer find any difference between any two candidates so they just resort to who had the more popular last name, or who had the fancier television advertisement, or even the one who can sing better, Yap said.