Bossism

John Sidel’s account of Philippine local power, and the standing challenge to the frameworks built on culture and kinship. Where the patron-client tradition explains the system through reciprocal obligation, bossism puts coercion and local economic monopoly at the centre and treats kinship as something that decorates the arrangement rather than producing it.

Teehankee groups it with Anderson’s caciquism and Snyder’s sultanism and neopatrimonialism as a “conflict, command and coercion” family of explanations, set against the patron-client family. The course carries it because a reader who only ever meets the kinship explanation will not notice how much of the argument rests on it.

Source: John T. Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines, Stanford University Press, 1999. Paid, and this course has not read it from the source. It is presented here as a named position in the literature, not as an argument the course has verified, and anyone scripting a line about it should read the book first. The grouping of frameworks is from Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, p. 177, free PDF.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back