Dyadic tie

A two-person link. Landé’s term for the shape of Philippine political relationships, and the reason it is worth keeping rather than simplifying is that it names precisely what a party in this system is not doing. It is not connecting an organisation to a constituency. It is connecting one man to another man, then repeating that at scale.

The consequence is practical. A tie between two people cannot be inherited by an institution, cannot be audited, and cannot be appealed. It also cannot be replaced by a successor without being rebuilt from scratch, which is one reason political families are durable and political programmes are not.

Source: Carl Landé’s framework, in which ties are described as dyadic, vertical and unequal, as carried in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, pp. 177 to 178, free PDF.

First used in: 1.6 · Two parties, one class, sixteen elections