Oligarchy

Rule by a small number. In the Philippine case the word is descriptive rather than rhetorical: a limited set of families, holding land and local office, with legal control of the national legislature, using it to protect what they hold.

The mechanism that produced it is the point. The families predate the American period, but the national arena does not. Elections built from the municipality upward promoted provincial power into a national body, and the transfer and resale of the friar estates put more land into the same hands.

The consequence that shows the structure most clearly is land reform, which came at the arrangement repeatedly across the following century and never got through, because the body that had to pass it was composed of the people it would take from.

Source: Rivera 1994, quoted in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, p. 154: the landed elites, through control of Congress, “transformed themselves into a national oligarchy that successfully repulsed the government’s attempts at land reform.” Free PDF: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/01361006.pdf

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