In an attempt to gain legitimacy for his authoritarian regime, Marcos sought to "normalize" political processes after a few years of ruling simply through presidential proclamations and decrees. In 1978, without lifting most of his authoritarian decrees and without fully restoring civil and political liberties, he called for elections for the Interim National Assembly, essentially a rubber-stamp parliament. These were followed in subsequent years by local, presidential, and regular Batasang Pambansa elections. The dictator set up his own political party, Kilusan ng Bagong Lipunan (KBL) or New Society Movement to take part in these pseudo-democratic processes. It dominated all the elections during 1978-84.
The KPL marked the shift from clientelistic to patrimonialistic party politics. The parties of the pre-authoritarian period has actually already begun the process of mutation into a new animal. The extent of patronage, bribery, fraud, coercion, and force — or "guns, goons, and gold" — in which they were engaged had grown out of all proportion to the usual clientelist politics. Marcos' party continued with all these dirty practices and brought the chicanery, intimidation, and violence to even higher levels. What mainly distinguished the KBL from pre-martial law parties, however, was that it was no longer just a means for securing or maintaining power or for defending particularistic interests. Marcos and his cronies, who dominated and controlled the KBL, indulged in brazen and all-out plunder of the state's resources. Many of their underlings in the party quickly picked up the tricks of the trade. The party drew hordes of ambitious, self-serving individuals (including those of the sycophantic ilk), served as the vehicle for forgetting them elected or appointed into power, and once they were in office, provided the network and connections for the systematic exploitation of the government's resources.
Not all in the KBL were of the patronage, corrupt, or plundering types. There were also some do-gooders, who perhaps naively thought they could achieve meaningful reforms under patrimonial dictatorship. Among these do-gooders were are some technocrats who were close to international financing institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). Under Marcos' patrimonial regime, squeaky clean Cesar Virata, Finance Minister and later Prime Minister, provided a most interesting counterpoint to the corrupt-dictator president. The IMF-WB, dumbly enough, showered billions of dollars in "development" loans to the corrupt dictatorial regime without realizing where the money really went. Filipinos now continue to pay the price for this folly.