By Jam Magdaleno
THIS ARTICLE was written one day before the election and the releasing of the results, but I am near certain that the outcome will be disappointing for “learned” voters. I emphasize the quotation marks because the prevalent discourse on voting in the Philippines is largely framed in two equally flawed ways: moral and educational.
For this article’s purpose, I will focus on the latter.
For the longest time, the government and civil society have treated voting as an educational issue. The assumption is simple: to nudge voters to vote for the “right” candidate, they must be “rightly” educated. Consistently, most government interventions focus on this. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has media partnerships, holds campus forums and digital campaigns (like #MagpaRehistroKa), while NGOs host countless “voter education” seminars in barangays.
At the heart of these campaigns lies what behavioral theorists call the Information Deficit Model (IDM), a term popularized by linguist Robin Lakoff. It frames voters as passive recipients — as if simply supplying the “right” facts can reshape choices. This assumes a blank-slate psychology that flattens the complexity of political behavior, ignoring how class, identity, and material realities shape how voters process information in the first place.
But voting, which inherently presupposes information-seeking, is not a passive political act that happens in a vacuum. Voting behavior is not neutral, not symmetrical, not zero-sum. As Daniel Kahneman and much of cognitive science tell us, humans don’t seek “truth” — we seek relevance, and that relevance is deeply shaped by our material and economic environment.
INFORMATION SEEKING IS CLASS-DRIVENClass D or E voters are not irrational for voting the way they do. They are precisely rational, strategic, and making the best decision available within their constraints. For a minimum-wage earner deciding between skipping a meal or accepting a P500 vote-buying offer, that money is not corruption but an immediate policy. In fact, a 2019 Ateneo School of Government empirical study found that 34% of Filipino voters surveyed admitted they would accept money or gifts in exchange for votes, not out of ignorance, but because it “helps with daily expenses.”
In other words, vote buying works, not because voters are simply irrational and uneducated, but because they are economically immobile. Voter education campaigns ignore this. They treat class D and E voters as if they are just temporarily unaware of “better” candidates, when in truth, these voters are responding to their lived realities.
Even beyond vote buying, this shift is consistent with how Filipino voters have moved away from yellow- and left-leaning politics toward the right since the Duterte era, driven by widespread discontent with how previous administrations handled drugs, crime, and the economy. While the disinformation problem is serious, it merely builds upon — and amplifies — the existing zeitgeist of discontent among Filipinos.
WHY VOTER EDUCATION FAILS AND SOMETIMES BACKFIRESThe focus on voter education often patronizes the poor. It assumes that if we just give voters the correct information, they’ll miraculously abandon local patrons or dynasts. But these campaigns are usually designed by middle-class technocrats and strategists anyway, relying on middle-class models of communication: brochures, lectures, webinars, infographics usually in English. Even grassroot-driven campaigns, which ostensibly master the art of looking like a grassroot movement, fail to acknowledge the vast difference between the gut issues of the majority of voters (security, economic relief) and the technocrats’ idea of political progress (good governance and gender equality).
Worse, as I had previously written, this backfires by alienating voters. You cannot tell someone to “vote wisely” if your idea of wisdom ignores their hunger. You cannot ask someone to think long-term if their problem is next week’s rent. Political scientist Frederic Schaffer argues that vote buying in the Global South is often “morally reframed as patronage” — a way to establish trust in systems that otherwise exclude the poor. Studies from the J-PAL Southeast Asia Lab have shown that even well-funded deliberative campaigns had minimal effect on voter choice without corresponding changes in their economic mobility.
VOTING AND ECONOMIC REFORMSThe focus, then, must shift toward meaningful economic reform and the improvement of people’s material conditions.
Across democracies, a well-documented pattern emerges: as economies grow, so does the quality of political participation. Seymour Martin Lipset’s modernization theory long argued that prosperity — through higher incomes, education, and urbanization — lays the groundwork for stable, more accountable democracies. This view is echoed in the empirical work of Boix and Stokes in 2003, who found that as national income rises, clientelism and patronage-based politics tend to fade, giving way to more programmatic, policy-driven choices at the ballot box.
A World Bank study by Keefer and Khemani further argues that when voters are economically insecure, they favor clientelist exchanges, but as material conditions improve, political preferences shift toward long-term, policy-based governance. We’ve seen this trajectory play out in Taiwan and South Korea, where rapid industrialization in the 20th century helped dismantle the grip of patronage politics, paving the way for more robust democratic institutions and policy-centered elections.
In the Philippines, this is a long but necessary battle. Among many other reforms, it begins with addressing the malnutrition crisis, which continues to stunt Filipino children’s physical growth and cognitive development at an alarming rate. It also involves expanding property rights so that Filipinos gain a sense of security and economic agency, factors that translate into more meaningful political participation. Finally, it requires reimagining the country’s economic direction by shifting away from inward-looking, protectionist policies toward a more outward-looking, competitive economy.
Without addressing the structural roots of political behavior, the notion of an “educated” electorate remains a largely elitist aspiration — one that is detached from the daily realities that shape voter decisions. The cycle of discontent and disappointment will only persist.
Jam Magdaleno is a political and economic researcher, writer, and communications strategist. He currently serves as the head of Information and Communications at the Foundation for Economic Freedom, a policy think tank in the Philippines.
