Cacique democracy

Benedict Anderson’s term for the Philippine arrangement: not a fraud, not a dictatorship, and not a democracy that failed, but a working electoral system whose predictable outcome is the rotation of a small set of families, because everything upstream of the counting has already decided the result.

The value of the term is that it names an arrangement rather than a behaviour. “Corruption” describes what people do. Cacique democracy describes the conditions under which doing it is the expected outcome, which is a claim you can test, date and attack.

Anderson’s essay is subtitled “Origins and Dreams,” and the argument in that subtitle is the one Level 1 ends on. It was published two years after the dictatorship fell, as a warning.

Source: Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review I/169, May to June 1988. Free PDF from New Left Review: https://newleftreview.org/issues/i169/articles/benedict-anderson-cacique-democracy-and-the-philippines-origins-and-dreams.pdf . Reprinted in Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, Verso, 1998. Note that the research base flags a standing challenge to all kinship-based readings, John T. Sidel’s Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines, Stanford, 1999, which has not been read from the source for this build.

First used in: 1.4 · Elections that made the landlords stronger