1.4 · Elections that made the landlords stronger

IntermediateDuration ~11 min readTools Your notes file from Level 0

The big idea: the Americans did not create the families who run this country. They held real elections that only those families could win, and handed a provincial elite a nation to run.

The analogy

Open casting. Genuinely open. Nobody is bribed, the sides are the same for everybody, the panel actually watches.

And in the eligibility line, three requirements. You must be able to read the sides in a language most of the town does not read. Or you must already own equipment worth more than a farm. Or you must have run a set for the last production company that was in town.

Everything after that is clean. The auditions happen, the choices are honest, the results hold up. And when it is over, the same handful of people who ran everything before are now cast, on the record, by an open process, with a piece of paper saying the town chose them.

That is not a rigged audition. It is worse, and it is more durable. A rigged audition can be exposed. An honest audition with a written eligibility list produces a legitimate result, and legitimacy is much harder to argue with than fraud.

Then the production does one more thing. It builds its national unit by promoting whoever came out of each town’s casting. Nobody is imposed from above. And the national picture ends up being made by the same people who already ran every town, with the added authority of having been chosen.

How it works

Say the thing straight first, because you have already noticed it and dancing around it would insult you.

This country has voted, continuously, for more than a century. Not sham voting. Real contests, real counting, real losers who left office. And at the end of that century the same surnames hold the same provinces, and in many places you can trace the family holding a seat back further than you can trace your own. If your first reaction to that is contempt for the people who keep putting them back, hold it. Do not put it down. Just hold it next to what follows, and see which one is doing the explaining by the end.

The Americans took the country by war and started holding elections almost immediately. Municipal elections first, then legislative, then eventually presidential. This looks like the most generous thing a colonial power has ever done, and in intention it may even have been. It is also the single most consequential decision in this entire level.

Start with the franchise, meaning who is allowed to vote. The first rules the American administration wrote, in 1901, limited the vote to men over twenty-three who had lived in the municipality six months, and who fell into one of three classes: literate in English or Spanish, owner of real property above a set value, or holder of local office under the Spanish administration.

Read those three classes as a description rather than as a rule. Literate in the coloniser’s language. Propertied. Or a former holder of the office you met in Lesson 1.2. That is not an eligibility list. That is a portrait of the men the previous four hundred years had already put on top, written into law as the definition of a citizen who counts.

The result is the number that should stay with you. At the first legislative election, in 1907, the electorate was 1.15 percent of the population. Ninety-nine people in a hundred were outside the room while the arrangement that would govern them was decided by the hundredth.

Now the sequence, which matters as much as the eligibility. Alfred McCoy’s line is the compressed version of the whole era: the Americans “built electoral politics from the municipality upwards, thereby entrenching provincial families in both local and national offices.” Local first. Then those local winners were promoted into a national legislature. So the national arena was not built above provincial power and then filled. It was assembled out of provincial power, piece by piece, with each piece arriving already holding its own territory.

What that produced was not policy competition. Campaigns in the colonial period, as the specialist literature puts it, were “neither venues for the discussion of social issues nor mass appeals for voters, but negotiations between national political personalities and the provincial landowning elites.” There was nothing to debate. Every serious candidate came from the same class and wanted the same things, and the currency of politics became public works and government connections delivered to a locality, which is a currency the propertied could always outbid on.

Two more pieces and the machine is complete.

The Americans bought the friar estates and resold them, and the land, in Anderson’s phrase, fell “like ripe mangoes” into the hands of the families already positioned to catch it. And the party system collapsed into dominance almost at once: one party held the overwhelming majority of legislative seats within a few years and by the late nineteen thirties held effectively all of them.

That is the oligarchy, and the word is precise rather than rhetorical. A small number of families, holding land and local office, with legal control of the national legislature, using it to protect what they held. Land reform came at them repeatedly across the following century and never got through, because the body that had to pass it was made of the people it would take from.

Benedict Anderson gave the arrangement a name, and the name is the most useful thing in this lesson: cacique democracy. Not a fraud, not a dictatorship, not a democracy that failed. A functioning electoral system whose outcome is the rotation of a small set of families, because everything upstream of the counting decided the result.

Which brings back the thing you were holding.

The voter did not build this. The voter arrived, a century late, into an arena that had already been assembled, where the candidates on offer had been produced by an eligibility rule written before his grandparents were born. Widening the franchise did not dilute that elite, because nothing that made a candidacy possible was widened alongside it. More voters, same catalogue.

The idea worth releasing here is that democracy on its own was ever going to fix this. It was never the mechanism. It was the channel, and a channel carries whatever the surrounding arrangement pours into it.

The pattern

An honest election held on a rigged eligibility list produces a legitimate elite, which is far harder to remove than a fraudulent one. Three qualifying classes, all of them descriptions of the existing local elite. Roughly one percent voting. Local offices filled first, then promoted upward into a national body. The elite was not created here. It was given a national arena, a legal claim to legitimacy, and a state budget to run through. Whenever an outcome keeps reproducing under fair procedure, stop auditing the procedure and go look at who was allowed to enter it.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• This lesson is explainer-led, with one free primary workhorse. Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” in Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, pp. 149 to 202. Free PDF: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/01361006.pdf . It carries full election tables from 1907 to 2001 and quotes McCoy, Paredes, Rivera and Landé directly. Everything below with a Teehankee page number comes from that file.
• The franchise rules. Philippine Commission Act No. 60 (1901) limited the vote to males aged 23 and over, resident six months, and in one of three classes: literate in English or Spanish, owner of real property worth at least 500 pesos, or holder of local office before 1898. Teehankee 2002, p. 150, citing Tancangco 1988, p. 81.
• The turnout figure. The first legislative election, 30 July 1907, held under Act No. 1532 of 9 January 1907, had 104,966 registered voters, of whom 98,251 voted, being 1.15 percent of the population. Teehankee 2002, p. 151, citing Liang 1970, p. 67.
• The McCoy quotation. “From local elections in 1901, to legislative elections in 1907, and presidential elections in 1935, the Americans built electoral politics from the municipality upwards, thereby entrenching provincial families in both local and national offices.” Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines, 1994, p. 12, quoted in Teehankee 2002, p. 151. McCoy’s book is paid.
• The campaigns quotation. Electoral campaigns were “neither venues for the discussion of social issues nor mass appeals for voters, but negotiations between national political personalities and the provincial landowning elites.” Teehankee 2002, p. 151, citing Grossholtz 1964, Tancangco 1988 and Paredes 1989.
• One-party dominance, the table. Nacionalista Party seats in the lower house: 62 of 81 in 1909, 83 of 90 in 1919, 98 of 98 in 1938. Teehankee 2002, Table 1, p. 152, sourcing Hartmann, Hassall and Santos 2001 and Liang 1970.
• The land. Rivera 1994, quoted at Teehankee 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.” And Teehankee’s own summary at p. 154, that “the fusion of wealth and power brought about by political connections … instead of productivity, has undermined the post-colonial state’s capacity to realize broad national goals.”
• Cacique democracy, the term. Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review I/169, May to June 1988. Free PDF from New Left Review: https://newleftreview.org/issues/i169/articles/benedict-anderson-cacique-democracy-and-the-philippines-origins-and-dreams.pdf . Anderson is also the source of the friar-lands line, that the estates “would fall like ripe mangoes into the hands of the likes of President Aquino’s immediate ancestors.” Reprinted in Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, Verso, 1998.
• The honest gaps, named. The specialist verdict on this period belongs to Ruby R. Paredes (ed.), Philippine Colonial Democracy, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1988, Ateneo edition 1989, which is out of print and library-only. Her conclusion, via Teehankee 2002, p. 149: the Philippines developed politically according to the interest and power of the colonial authority, and “the Filipino’s first formative experience of democracy left a problematic legacy.” Separately, the friar-lands transfer has a real hole in it. The 1903 purchase price and the hectarage involved could not be verified in the research pass, and the topic is owned by Dennis Morrow Roth, The Friar Estates of the Philippines, University of New Mexico Press, 1977, which is library-only and has not been read. No hectarage figure appears in this lesson for that reason.
• What is deliberately not claimed. No figure for how much land changed hands, no share of the national legislature held by any named family, and no count of how many 1907 electors were former local officeholders. None of those survived checking.
• Also read as the other half. The same administration built mass public education, a public health system and the beginnings of a professional civil service, and armed resistance did not end in 1902. Agoncillo’s chapter title for 1901 to 1913 is “The Continuing Resistance.” The strengths thread in this era is real and it is in the History research map in full.

Your one move

Pick one province. Yours, or the one your family comes from, or the one you have shot in most.

Find out who currently holds the governorship and one congressional seat there, and then find out how far back the same surname goes in that province’s elected offices. A search engine and the official election records will get you most of the way in twenty minutes, and where the trail stops, mark where it stops.

Then write one line answering this: at the point where that family first appears in the record, what were they, before they were politicians. Landowners, merchants, a local officeholder under the Spanish administration, something else.

Thirty minutes. Done when you have one surname, one earliest appearance you can point to, and one line about what they were beforehand.

Want to go further?

Open the Teehankee PDF and go to the election tables. Do not read the text, just look at the seat shares over time. Watching one party go from a large majority to the entire chamber over three decades, in tabular form, does something that no paragraph about elite dominance can do. It is also free, and it is the best single artifact in this level for a documentary graphic.

The needle: the office from Lesson 1.2 has now been handed a country, a legislature and a legal claim to the consent of the governed. Your one move traces one family back to the point where they were something other than a politician. That point, whatever year you land on, is the moment the design you are angry about acquired the specific people it is currently running through.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Franchise
• Oligarchy
• Cacique democracy

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. Explain, using the franchise rules and the turnout figure, why elections built from the municipality upward strengthened provincial families instead of dispersing their power.

   Because turnout was low, and low turnout always favours incumbents regardless of who is allowed to voteBecause the three eligible classes were literacy in English or Spanish, property worth at least five hundred pesos, or having held local office under Spain, which is a description of the existing local elite. Roughly one percent of the population voted, and the men they elected locally were then promoted into a national legislature, so the national arena was assembled out of provincial power rather than built above itBecause the American administration appointed the winners in advance and the elections were a formalityBecause municipal elections came first, and local government is where corruption is hardest to detect

2. What is the difference between saying the Americans created the Philippine elite and saying they gave it a nation?

   No real difference. Both describe American responsibility for the same outcomeThe first version is the nationalist reading and the second is the American reading, and the course adopts neitherThe elite already existed, made by the Spanish office and the friar-land transfers. What was new was a national arena, a legal monopoly on legitimacy, and a state with a budget to run through. That distinction is what makes the argument survive contact with the evidenceThe first is correct. Before 1898 there was no propertied class capable of national politics

3. Anderson calls the arrangement cacique democracy. What work is that term doing that "corruption" does not do?

   It names an arrangement rather than a behaviour. Elections are real and results are counted, and the outcome is still the rotation of a small set of families, because the eligibility and the sequence decided it before the counting startedIt emphasises coercion and local monopoly, which is the standing challenge to the kinship-based readingsIt is a more academic word for the same thing, which makes it more usable in a documentaryIt locates the problem in Spanish colonial inheritance rather than in American policy

4. A friend says the answer to political families is simply more democracy: more elections, more voters, more participation. What does this era say to that?

   That the problem is turnout rather than structure, and the fix is compulsory votingThat it would work, since the franchise was the only real barrier and it has long since been removedThat democracy is unsuited to societies with strong kinship obligations, which is why the American model failed hereThat elections are a channel, and a channel carries whatever the surrounding arrangement puts into it. The same elite got stronger as the franchise widened, because nothing that made a candidacy possible changed alongside the vote

Check answers

You can move on when you can… explain, using the 1901 franchise rules and the 1907 turnout figure, why building elections from the municipality upward entrenched provincial families rather than dispersing their power.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Next up: 1.5 · Ruin, and the pardon nobody voted for, where a world war goes through the country and the settlement afterward decides who has to answer for anything.
• The History research map carries this era in full and sets out the eight-link genealogy, of which this lesson is link five. It also holds the strengths thread for the American period, which this lesson only gestures at.
• Teehankee’s 2002 chapter is free, and it is the most useful single PDF in Level 1. Election tables from 1907 to 2001, with the load-bearing quotations from McCoy, Rivera and Landé already assembled and cited.
• Anderson’s essay is free from New Left Review and it is where the term you just learned comes from. Read the opening pages at least. He is writing two years after EDSA and warning about exactly what Lesson 1.8 shows happening.