IF THERE'S one thing I vividly remember from my Political Science class in college, it is when my professor said that the Philippines is not a democracy, rather an oligarchy. According to the New World Encyclopedia, oligarchy is “a form of government in which political power effectively rests with a small, elite segment of society. The term was used by Aristotle to refer to despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for often corrupt or selfish purposes. In most classic oligarchies, governing elites were recruited exclusively from a hereditary ruling caste, whose members tended to exercise power in the interests of their own class.”
Auburn University Professor Dr. Paul M. Johnson defines oligarchy as “any system of government in which virtually all political power is held by a very small number of wealthy but otherwise unmeritorious people who shape public policy primarily to benefit themselves financially through direct subsidies to their agricultural estates or business firms, lucrative government contracts, and protectionist measures aimed at damaging their economic competitors — while displaying little or no concern for the broader interests of the rest of the citizenry. ‘Oligarchy’ is also used as a collective term to denote all the individual members of the small corrupt ruling group in such a system. The term always has a negative or derogatory connotation in both contemporary and classical usage, in contrast to aristocracy (which sometimes has a derogatory connotation in modern usage, but never in classical).”
This definition essentially captures the reality in the Philippines, as the political and economic scene in the country has been under the control of a few notable families, and it has been unusually normal for a politician's son, daughter, wife, brother or other relative to run for the same or other government office. This practice is prevalently known as political dynasties, which is considered the equivalent of an oligarchy in political science. American political scientist Alfred McCoy aptly describes this as “an anarchy of families.”
However, this phenomenon is not completely unique in the Philippines as the presence of oligarchs in other nations has also been noted such as the Bushes and Kennedys of the US or the Lopezes of Columbia. However, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, on their article entitled Political Dynasties in the Philippines published on their online blog, emphasized that the magnitude of this convention is incomparable as “60 percent of congress-people elected in 2007 had a previous relative who were also in congress (and) the analogous figure in the US was 7 percent. In roughly half of the 80 provinces of the Philippines, the governor is related to one of the congress-people.”
Acemoglu and Robinson briefly explained that political dynasties originated from the democracy introduced by the Americans, in which during the first elections organized by the Americans, eligible electorates only came from the principalia, a set of families recognized by the Americans. Interestingly, Teresa Almeida’s article on Prospect Journal coined the term “Oligarchipelago” to describe how oligarchic and patrimonial systems in the Philippines prevented the creation of a truly democratic government and perpetuated unequal economic distribution and argued that “the Philippines had a fundamentally weak democracy that allowed policies of patronage and crony capitalism.” (To be continued)