Chapter 9: Uncovering the Dark Side: Social Capital and Political Beliefs in Filipino Families

Family has always been considered as a primary source of social capital. The benefits it provides extend to acquisition of other forms of capital, from economic to cultural. But discussion of the underside of social capital, which includes exclusion and cohesion, remains to be underexplored. This is particularly true when politics is the point of discussion, especially in a time of election. Robert Nisbet (1953) argues that the modern welfare state's expansion into everyday life sapped the vitality of traditional religious, ethnic, fraternal, and familial organizations. Using Bourdieu and Coleman's concepts of social capital, this chapter seeks to describe the dynamics between members of a family and characterize how the individual members’ political stance affects the amount of social capital they acquire through the family as an institution. This chapter argues that this is highly observable in Filipino families. Further, this chapter argues that the need for social capital pushes individual members of a family to conform to a collective political stance rather than subscribe to personal political beliefs.