Abstract
“Ambag” is a Tagalog word for “contribution” and Filipinos contribute to lawmaking through their district representatives. Lawmakers are writing more bills than ever. For the 18th Congress alone, close to 13,000 bills and resolutions have already been filed, but only 4 out of a hundred bills actually survive into becoming laws. Since the number of bills that pass is meager, it can be inferred that these are the bills that are being prioritized and the researchers want to explore if these are truly the case. This study aimed to identify what were the common, underlying themes of House Bills filed during the 18th Congress. Being able to identify these themes would allow citizens to know the priorities of the current government and hold the representatives accountable. Using only 13 lines of code, the researchers retrieved about 13,000 house bill documents from the House of Representatives website in less than 2 minutes which were then converted into a usable dataset. The researchers applied Latent Semantic Analysis and performed agglomerative clustering to the scraped data. The identified six emerging themes were (1) Public service, which contains state services for the general public; (2) Education, which is mostly on converting facilities to become independent national high schools, (3) Broadcasting franchises, which is about Congressional approval for networks to operate; (4) Infrastructure, for the conversion or construction of public works and highways, (5) Judiciary, particularly pertaining to regional and municipal trial courts; and lastly (6), TESDA’s skills assessment and development programs. However, not all of these bills were passed into law. Looking at the bills passed, only public service and franchise clusters emerged. Various public services and bills related to franchise renewal were also passed with the exception of ABS-CBN. Comparing the bills that became laws before and during the pandemic, it appeared that the House’s priorities were on: (1) COVID-19, to solve systemic challenges to healthcare and the economy brought about by the pandemic; and (2) broadcasting, where Congress continued to approve renewals of network franchises.
