Introspective
Business World, 7 October 2012

 

The approach of next year’s elections has refocused public attention on everyone’s bete noire — political dynasties. In both the popular press and the academic literature, dynasties are blamed as the root cause of the problems plaguing the Philippine politics. This conventional wisdom has become so established that a provision (Article II, Sec. 26) was included in the 1987 Constitution to “prohibit” political dynasties. Public discussion now appears to suppose that the most important hindrance to political progress is lawmakers’ failure to pass a statute to implement the constitutional prohibition of dynasties.

But are things really so simple? Political dynasties are merely symptoms, not the disease itself-like pustules in a body politic afflicted with the plague. Lancing them will do little good.

To begin with, political dynasties are by no means unique to the Philippines, and examples in other countries are not hard to find. Well-known US examples are the Kennedys and the Bushes, but also the Tafts, the Rockefellers, and a whole Wikipedia list of others. (Indeed, the number of U.S. dynasties would have been bigger if the US had electoral term limits and left their relatives more room to run — after all some US senators and representatives have been in power for more than 60 years!)

In Japan, previous prime ministers Koizumi, Abe, and Fukuda as well many other less prominent names are associated with political dynasties. India has the Nehru-Gandhis, Pakistan the Bhuttos and Sharifs. And as a clincher, observe the well-entrenched tradition of “princelings” (offspring of early revolutionary leaders) in China. The recently disgraced Bo Xilai was a prime example (being the son of Bo Yibo, one of the “eight immortals” of Chinese politics). The incoming Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is himself a “princeling”, son of the first-generation revolutionary and politician, Xi Zhongxun.

In short, “dynasties” also exist in other countries, where their presence is regarded as a sometimes curious, sometimes annoying, feature of their politics. But rarely are they regarded as the primary obstacle to political development, as the primordial cause of political immaturity. Wherein lies the difference?

In most of these and other examples, political families and dynasties are not prohibited, but they are not the principal vehicles for politics. Rather, dynasties are embedded in and subject to the larger discipline of impersonal organizations, namely political parties or movements. While members of a dynasty may gain some advantage, the fact itself seldom suffices to determine their successful election. They must still compete for and answer to larger impersonal bodies and constituencies that — at least ostensibly — subsume family ties, personal alliances, and ambitions to larger, overarching, problems.

Many countries have been lucky to have history itself lay down overarching issues as a natural basis for inclusive mass-based parties: an independence struggle created India’s Congress party; wars of national liberation forged the communist parties of China and Vietnam; serious ethnic grievances formed Malaysia’s UMNO; and Japan’s defeat and drive for economic recovery provided a focus for the Liberal Democratic Party. In each case mass loyalties could be forged for causes that were larger, more urgent, more compelling than an individual clan’s ambition. It made more sense, therefore, for clans, sects, and tribes to join the larger movement as a means to gain power rather than to go it alone.

Not so for the Philippines, where historical conditions (too long to examine but relating mostly to peculiar US-Philippine relations) made it unnecessary for the elite to form mass parties. In a sense, Philippine elites have had it too “easy”. Their access to power depended not on the mobilization of masses for an epic struggle but on idiosyncratic, often personalistic, accommodation with the occupier. Beyond the defeated Revolution, history did not provide a need for elites to organize far beyond their family spheres and personal cliques. As a result the parties they formed — to this day — have invariably been as transient, superficial, and fickle as the individual egos around which they revolve. The exception that tests the rule is the only impersonal mass party in Philippine history that has been mildly successful — the communist party in its various incarnations. Communist longevity is supported by the fact they have a long-term cause whose realization entails significant difficulty and therefore demands organization. The MILF and Moro identity are another example. The tragedy, of course, is that neither of these organizations has thus far shown any interest in participating fully and openly in the current political system.

Philippine politics, in short, is not broken because dynasties are strong; rather, dynasties are strong because politics is broken. Douglass North’s distinction between organizations and institutions comes to mind. Prohibiting dynasties merely prevents some organizations from playing. What we really need is a change in the rules of the game, i.e., institutional change.

What then is to be done? The answer may seem paradoxical. It is perhaps time to make things difficult, not for political dynasties but for political parties. What is urgently needed is not the prohibition of dynasties but the tightening of rules in order to ensure commitment, enlarge the scope, and establish the longevity of political parties. The problem, after all, is not in putting up political parties; it is putting up parties of an adequate quality. For starters, a higher minimum number of registered members — numbering, say, in the hundreds of thousands — might be required before parties are allowed to field candidates. Significant evidence of party activity and organization in off-election years, large funds deposited and held in government escrow, and a host of other conditions can be imposed to screen out the frivolous, weed out the transient, and establish long-term commitment. A lesson from industrial organization is important: difficult entry implies difficult exit, and it is the latter we desire. At the very least, that should help ferret out the clowns and opportunists now exploiting the lax rules of the party-list system. Ultimately, it may affect the behavior of the national parties as well.

The “facial-feedback” hypothesis in psychology (actually anticipated by Darwin) suggests that externally moving the facial muscles associated with an emotion can enhance or even engender that emotion itself. Stimulating your smile-muscles, for example, might actually make you happy. If history has been stingy in providing us the material for genuine mass parties, then perhaps we might at least encourage their form, in the hope that by doing so we might stimulate their substance.