Political dynasty

A family holding two or more elective offices simultaneously or in succession. The Philippine research literature works with definitions close to that, and the measured share has risen rather than fallen since the dictatorship ended: roughly 80 percent of provincial governors, 67 percent of House representatives and 53 percent of mayors as of 2025, against 57, 48 and 40 percent respectively in 2004.

The fact that turns this from a statistic into a mechanism is constitutional. The 1987 Constitution prohibits political dynasties “as may be defined by law,” and Congress has never passed the defining law. The two narrow implementations that do exist, for youth councils and for one autonomous region, show the ban is entirely legislatable. It passes where the legislators writing it are not the people it would remove.

Source: 1987 Constitution, Article II, Section 26. Prevalence figures compiled at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_families_in_the_Philippines . The peer-reviewed cross-check is Pablo Querubín’s working paper (March 2013, free PDF), which finds that more than half of elected Philippine congressmen and governors have a relative who previously held elected office, and that a narrow first-race winner is about four times likelier than a narrow loser to have a relative in office later. Mendoza, Beja, Venida and Yap (2012) is cited via Querubín rather than directly, because its full text was not read in this course’s research pass.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back