Shannon Samantha I. Salamante | Clarita B. Rivera
The Philippines has been known as one of the nations which follow the democratic type of government. Democracy, also known as the rule of many, has been used for many years. However, democracy, although it boasts that the people have freedom, is not absolute. There are laws and limitations because it would be chaos without control. Mostly, the citizens elect people who will represent them. But there is a thing called direct democracy wherein the people, or the electorate themselves, meddle with the government’s affairs. The main problem that can be seen is that, even though the people have the right to initiate to make and amend laws, some just do not care or do not want to involve themselves in politics. This paper’s primary aim is to focus on policy formulation procedures in local government units and to determine how involved the people are in exercising their rights in their locale. To be more specific, this paper also aims to evaluate how informed the citizens are of their rights in exercising their rights in direct democracy, to determine whether the citizens only engage in it when they see it as beneficial for them, and to analyze whether policymakers should only be for those who have knowledge and wisdom in the field. The theory that the researcher contextualized in this study is Herbert Simon’s Decision-Making Theory. In conducting this research, the qualitative approach was used through descriptive phenomenology. The gathered data shows that citizens are not aware of their right to initiate new policies and that they rely on their contribution to elect representatives to formulate policies without directly engaging with them. The initiative to participate in policy formulation is close to non-existent as the citizens are either not aware that they have the right to do so or think that they are not the right persons to partake in the said affairs.
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