In many democracies a small subset of individuals enjoys a de facto electoral advantage. The existence of political dynasties, where individuals from a narrow set of families obtain larger vote shares and are more likely to access office, illustrates this phenomenon. In this paper, I study political dynasties in the Philippines and provide evidence of dynastic persistence. More precisely, I provide evidence that incumbency has a causal effect on the probability of having future relatives in office. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close elections, I find that candidates who barely win their first election by a small margin are around 5 times more likely to have a relative in office in the future than individuals who barely lose their first election and never serve. I discuss alternative channels that may explain dynastic persistence in the Philippines. I argue that access to office and public resources — important in clientelistic democracies like the Philippines — allows incumbents to give relatives an electoral advantage if they first run while they are still in office. Occupational choice, while plausibly important, is less likely to be the main driver of dynastic persistence.
Family and Politics: Dynastic Persistence in the Philippines Available to Purchase
*A previous version of this article circulated with the title “Family and Politics: Dynastic Incumbency Advantage in the Philippines.” I would like to thank Daron Acemoglu, Esther Duflo, James Robinson and James M. Snyder Jr. for all their comments and support. I also thank the editors and two anonymous referees for comments that greatly improved the paper. Participants in seminar presentations at CIDE, Harvard, LACEA, MIT, NEUDC, NYU, UCLA, Universidad de los Andes and Yale offered valuable feedback. I thank Cesi Cruz, Julien Labonne, Horacio Larreguy, Sahar Parsa, and Roman Zarate for their help at different stages of this project. Rodel Cahiyang provided excellent research assistance with compiling biographical information for a subsample of incumbents. Finally, this paper would not have been possible without the hospitality and generosity of many people in the Philippines during my visit in 2009. I thank Rep. Juan Romeo Acosta, Arsenio Balisacan, Emmanuel de Dios, Jose Ferraris, Rep. Risa Hontiveros, Nico Ravanilla, Juan Rafael Supangco, Jaime Veneracion and Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri, and the staff at CenPEG, the Institute for Popular Democracy, Innovations for Poverty Action and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. The financial support of Banco de la Republica and the Schultz Fund at MIT is gratefully acknowledged.
Querubin P (2016), "Family and Politics: Dynastic Persistence in the Philippines". Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 11 No. 2 pp. 151–181, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00014182
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