Patron-client tie

The basic relationship patronage is assembled from: a patron above and a client below, unequal, personal and open-ended. The patron dispenses goods, protection or access; the client returns loyalty, votes and service. Neither side signs anything and neither side can appeal to a process, because the relationship is the process.

Stacked, these ties run from a household to a barangay figure to a provincial family to the capital, which is how a system with no mass membership can still mobilise a nation on election day.

The framework has a standing objection against it and the course carries the objection rather than burying it. Benedict Kerkvliet argued in 1995 that it “tends to reify if not valorize reciprocity, smooth interpersonal relationships, kinship and fictive kinship bonds,” meaning it can promote a real social practice from a resource into an explanation. The position held here is that obligation between people who know each other is observably real, and that a rent-seeking structure exploits it rather than being generated by it.

Source: Carl Landé’s patron-client framework and Kerkvliet’s 1995 objection, both as carried in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, pp. 155 and 177 to 178, free PDF.

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