Banning dynasties in the Philippines

Perhaps nothing better captures our “negative exceptionalism” than the brazenly totalistic capture of our elected offices by a few families. Even at the height of political reform under the Benigno Aquino III administration, more than 80 percent of legislative seats were occupied by political dynasties. Across the nation, as few as 178 political dynasties dominated 73 out of a total of 81 provinces (before the division of Maguindanao into Maguindanao del Norte and del Sur). Even when compared with our peers in the region and the postcolonial world, the situation is singularly anomalous: among the world’s most unequal societies, political families dominated a maximum of 40 percent of seats in Mexico and around 10 percent in Argentina.

From the Thaksins in Thailand to the Jokowis in Indonesia and the Lees in Singapore, many Southeast Asian nations have also been dominated by family politics, but none as perniciously and incompetently as the Philippines. Not even relatively underdeveloped and feudalistic semidemocracies such as Pakistan, which was once dominated by the Bhutto family, nor India even at the peak of the Nehru-Gandhi family dominance before the rise of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. In short, neither our “Asian” nor our “Latin” cultural history can properly explain the anomalous hegemony of political dynasties in the Philippines. Perhaps the best explanation was provided by the great political scientist Benedict Anderson, who, in his trenchant essay “Cacique Democracy,” traced our dynastic politics to the peculiar ability of our mestizo-comprador ruling class’ ability to preserve its privileges and entrench itself under the aegis of multiple colonial powers. After all, few countries have been colonized so thoroughly by so many alien imperial powers throughout the modern age.

As historian Vicente Rafael has eloquently argued, even our revolutionary forefathers were not so “revolutionary” in social terms, since they never had a goal beyond “uniting” the Philippine colony under their leadership for the sake of overthrowing Spain. Rarely do the Katipunan documents make mention of social categories. What they sought, Rafael argues, was more political regime change than what Alexis de Tocqueville understood as the comprehensive “revolving” of the social order, namely the empowerment of the masses and the aspirational middle class at the expense of the Ancien Régime. “[Katipuneros] never had a program for addressing social inequities, only for instituting legal equality within the terms of Spanish civil law,” Rafael observes. “[T]he Katipunan never planned to redistribute land or to democratize social relations.”

Lest we forget, our political oligarchy is perfectly mirrored in our economy. Just as the World Bank hailed the Philippines as “Asia’s Rising Tiger Economy” in the early 2010s, the country’s 40 richest families devoured 76 percent of newly created growth, leaving the bottom 99.9 percent to scramble over barely a quarter of fresh prosperity. The comparable number in Thailand was 33 percent, and only 5.6 percent for Malaysia and just 2.8 percent for Japan. In short, the Philippines has suffered from simultaneous market and democratic failure, as oligopolistic competition defines the “dynamism” of our social system.

By and large, our elections, therefore, have been a relatively managed, peaceful way of rotating power among competing factions of our oligarchic class. The only “democratization” following the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship, which temporarily suspended the liberal oligarchic order in favor of kleptocratic despotism, was the addition of new layers of the “elite,” namely celebrities, businessmen, and (yes!) contractors, who quickly built their own dynastic bases with the characteristic rapaciousness of the nouveau-riche.

This “cacique democracy,” however, reached its apogee under the Marcos-Duterte axis, which has overseen an era of hyper-impunity on both corruption and human rights fronts. In response to social anger, more than a dozen antidynasty bills have been passed to enable a long-standing, fossilized provision of our Constitution (see Article II, Section 26). The problem, however, is that most of the bills are performative or politically infeasible given the dominance of dynasties, who clearly are in no mood for political hara-kiri. More crucially, even outright banning dynasties alone wouldn’t solve our problem, since they could just end up funding their proxies in the next elections. The reality is that running for any elected office is too prohibitive for any ordinary citizen, no matter how well-intentioned and competent. This is why what we need is nothing short of a comprehensive reform package, which creates real political parties, punishes corruption and vote-buying, and creates sufficient prosperity to empower all voters in the face of oligarchic rapacity.