Patronage

The exchange of public resources for political loyalty, conducted through a person rather than through a rule. Public works, jobs, permits and contracts stop being policy outputs and become currency: things a particular office holder hands to a particular household, in a way that is remembered on both sides.

Its signature is that the benefit arrives with a name attached. A road built by policy is a road. A road built by patronage is a favour, and favours have to be returned. In the Third Republic this was not a deviation from how the parties worked. It was how they worked, since neither had a programme to compete on and both competed instead on their ability to deliver concrete benefits to localities.

Source: The formulation used here follows Carl Landé’s account of Philippine party competition from 1946 to 1971, as carried in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” in Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, p. 155 n.7, free PDF. Landé found the two parties competed by “building personal political followings, and then seeking additional votes from uncommitted voters by using their government connections to bring public works projects and other concrete benefits to their localities.”

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