The impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte will be a numbers game. Looking back on the track records of the senator-judges can foreshadow how their loyalties may either endure or falter.
“Legislative voting patterns are not random. They are the product of institutional incentives, party relationships, coalition dynamics, constituency pressures, and individual preferences,” political analyst and Ateneo de Manila University assistant professor Arjan Aguirre told Rappler.
He added that while these votes show where senators may initially lean, they do not determine how they will ultimately vote in the impeachment trial. According to him, senators act strategically, adapting to new political realities instead of merely repeating past behavior to give them better potential returns.
He summarized these incentives into six factors that may push a senator’s vote to conviction or acquittal.
For him, assessing these factors through voting behavior provides a more reliable signal of alignment — even compared to the positions that these officials may explicitly express.
