The ebook on The 2019 Midterm Elections of the Department of Political Science compiles faculty’s op-eds on the key concerns of elections in the country. In 2019, authors argued the significance of the midterms as a “referendum” on the sitting Duterte government (Aguirre 2019; Juliano 2019)  in which the major issues to be validated by the electorate (Barretto, 2019) were federalism and constitutional change, drug control policy, and the South China Sea (Candelaria 2019).  As a “democratic” country, elections provide the minimum index for measuring democratic outcomes but as Candelaria (2019) has argued, it is not the act of voting alone that makes a democracy, but the ability of the electorate to set agenda, participate in debates (Aguirre 2019) and to be informed of decisions of the government. 

Beyond the focus on midterm elections, the ebook presents relevant issues such as the voting patterns of the electorate (Lao, 2019) including the impact of vote shaming (Berse 2019) and the failure of the opposition to capture electoral victory in the senate (Mendoza 2019). 

They remain history’s contending issues to learn from as we move towards 2022.