1.6 · Two parties, one class, sixteen elections

BeginnerDuration ~10 min readTools A page, and one honest memory from your own working life

The big idea: the country held sixteen national elections in twenty-five years and never once held an argument about how it should be run, because the two parties on the ballot were one class of people operating one machine under two names.

The analogy

Think about a producer who pays the crew out of his own pocket.

Not through a payroll. Not on a schedule anyone can point at. He comes to set on Friday with an envelope, and he hands it to you personally, and he remembers doing it.

Nothing about that is illegal and the money is real. But watch what it does to the room. Your loyalty attaches to him rather than to the production. You cannot appeal a decision, because there is no process to appeal to, only a man to ask. And when he needs something unreasonable at two in the morning, you will do it, because the envelope was personal and so is the ask.

Now imagine there are two production companies in town and both work exactly this way. You can switch. People do switch, all the time. Switching changes who hands you the envelope. It does not produce a payroll, because neither company has any reason to build one, and a payroll would be the end of the only advantage either of them has.

That is the Philippine party system between independence and martial law, and it is close enough that the vocabulary transfers almost word for word.

How it works

The country voted constantly. In the quarter century between independence and martial law there were 16 national and local elections, about one national election every sixteen months, on top of frequent local ones. That is not the record of a people indifferent to democracy. It is a lot of voting.

And it produced no argument. Carl Landé’s finding, carried in Julio Teehankee’s survey of Philippine electoral politics, is that across that whole period the two parties were “for all practical purposes, identical in their structures, social make-up, and policies.” One of them had split off from the other in the first place. They competed, Landé wrote, 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.”

Read that second half again, because it is the whole lesson. The competition was real. It was just not a competition about anything. It was a competition over who would be positioned to hand things out.

That system has a name. Patronage is the exchange of public resources for political loyalty, run through a person rather than through a rule. The unit it is built from is the patron-client tie: one patron above, one client below, unequal, personal, and open-ended. Landé called these dyadic ties, meaning two-person, because that is the honest description. It is not a party linking to a constituency. It is one man linking to another man, repeated at scale, and the chain runs from the provincial family down to the barangay and up to the capital.

The organisations sitting on top of that were cadre parties. Wurfel’s description, also carried in Teehankee, is that they “did not seek mass membership, only mass support on election day,” and were run by a small circle of incumbent and professional politicians. A party with no members has nobody to answer to between elections. It has no reason to develop a position, because a position is a promise, and a promise can be checked. An envelope cannot be checked. It has either arrived or it has not.

What the winner actually won is worth naming precisely. Economists call the extra money you can charge because you control access to something, rather than because you produced anything, a rent. A licence, a permit, a contract, a monopoly route, a seat on the committee that approves the road. Public works under this system are not policy. They are the currency patronage is paid in, and an election is the event that decides who gets to spend it.

Now the honest part, and it is the reason this lesson exists rather than a slogan about corrupt politicians.

The patron-client framework is a tool, and the tool has a standing objection against it. Benedict Kerkvliet argued that it “tends to reify if not valorize reciprocity,” which in plain speech means it takes a real Filipino social practice, mutual obligation between people who know each other, and quietly promotes it from a resource into an explanation. Other scholars go further and drop the framework altogether, preferring accounts built on coercion and local monopoly rather than on culture and kinship. Those are named in the receipts and Lesson 1.8 takes them up properly, because that is where three of them get compared on the same object.

The position this course holds, and will hand to Level 2 unresolved on purpose: obligation between people who know each other is real, it is observable, and it is not what generates this. It is what a rent-seeking structure has to work with. A machine that needed loyalty found a society that already produced loyalty, and used it.

One more thing belongs on the page at the same weight as everything above. For that quarter century the elections were genuinely uncertain. Incumbents lost. Power changed hands without tanks, in a region where that was rare. And Mahar Mangahas, reading Social Weather Stations survey data, found that the typical Filipino voter, fully aware of what poverty was doing to him, was “idealistic, conscientious, and responsible.” The voter was not the defective component. The voter was the only part of the system doing its job.

The pattern

When both options pay you personally, switching options is not a choice about how you get paid. A cadre party has no members between elections, so nothing inside it rewards building a policy anyone could hold it to. What the winner wins is the right to distribute, which means an election settles who hands things out rather than what gets built. When two candidates differ only in the name attached to the envelope, stop asking who deserves your vote and start asking what would have to exist for the question to be worth answering.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• The workhorse source, free PDF. Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” in Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, pp. 149 to 202. Full election tables from 1907 to 2001. It is the single most useful free document in this level and it carries most of the quotations below.
• Sixteen elections. From 1946 to 1971 there were 16 national and local elections, about one national election every sixteen months, plus frequent local elections. Teehankee 2002, p. 155, citing Velasco 1989 and COMELEC 2001.
• The two parties were one party. The Liberal Party was the liberal wing of the Nacionalista Party, which split off in 1946. From 1946 to 1971 the two were “for all practical purposes, identical in their structures, social make-up, and policies,” competing 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.” Carl Landé, quoted in Teehankee 2002, p. 155 n.7.
• Cadre, not mass. Both parties “did not seek mass membership, only mass support on election day,” and were run by a small circle of incumbent and professional politicians. Teehankee 2002, p. 155, citing Wurfel 1988.
• The framework and its objection. Landé’s account is built on dyadic ties, vertical and unequal, patrons dispensing goods and clients returning loyalty. Benedict Kerkvliet’s 1995 objection is that the framework “tends to reify if not valorize reciprocity, smooth interpersonal relationships, kinship and fictive kinship bonds.” Teehankee 2002, pp. 177 to 178. The course carries the objection in the body rather than burying it here, because a tool with an unanswered objection is still a tool and the reader should know which end is sharp.
• The rival family of explanations, named here and taken up in Lesson 1.8. Teehankee groups the alternatives as a conflict, command and coercion family, against the patron-client family: Anderson’s cacique democracy (1988), Snyder’s sultanism (1998) and neopatrimonialism (1992), and John Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines, Stanford University Press, 1999. Teehankee 2002, p. 177.
• An honest gap, stated on the page. Sidel 1999 is paid and this course has not read it from the source. It is presented as a named position in the literature, not as an argument the course has verified. Anyone scripting a line about it should read the book first.
• The strengths thread, at equal weight. A competitive electoral democracy with genuinely uncertain outcomes ran for 26 years in a region where that was uncommon. And Teehankee, p. 178, cites Mahar Mangahas (1994) on Social Weather Stations data collected since 1985: “the typical Filipino voter, although cognisant of the stresses caused by poverty, is idealistic, conscientious, and responsible.”
• Where the rent language comes from. “Rent,” in the sense used here, is standard political economy vocabulary for income earned from controlling access rather than from producing. It is used in this lesson as a plain description of what a licence, a permit or a public works contract is worth to whoever controls it, and Level 2 puts it inside a full model with its citations attached.

Your one move

One transaction, four lines. This is not a confession and nobody is going to read it. It is a specimen, and the point is that you already have one.

Think of a time in your working life when something came to you because of who you knew rather than through a process. A slot, a rate, a permit, an introduction, a favour on a shoot. Pick the clearest one and write:

1. What was handed over, and by whom.
2. What was owed back, and whether anyone said so out loud.
3. What the process would have been if there had been one, and roughly how long it would have taken.
4. Whether that process actually exists.

Line four is the one that does the work. If the honest answer is that no functioning process exists, then what you have written down is not a story about your character or his. It is a description of a gap, and of the thing that grew in the gap because something had to.

Twenty minutes. Done when four lines exist and line four has a yes or a no in it.

Want to go further?

Underneath your four lines, write the same transaction as it would run inside a production with a real payroll and a signed call sheet. Same favour, same outcome, different route. What you are looking for is the specific thing the process would have cost that the personal route did not, in time or in paperwork or in someone’s discretion. That cost is the reason the personal route survives, and naming it is most of what Level 2 does with this material.

The needle: the office that was designed to be paid by the people it governed did not need a dictator to keep running. It ran through sixteen ordinary elections, in a democracy, with two parties, because both parties were built out of the same office.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Patronage
• Patron-client tie
• Dyadic tie
• Cadre party
• Rent

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

Check

Check yourself

1. Landé found the two parties of the Third Republic were identical in structure, social make-up and policies, and competed by bringing public works and other concrete benefits to their localities. What does that tell you about what an election in that period actually was?

   A distribution event, in which the prize was control of what gets handed out rather than the right to set a directionA referendum on the incumbent, since neither side offered a programme to judgeA ritual with no consequences, since the outcome was fixed in advanceA contest between two ideologies that happened to converge on the same voters

2. A cadre party seeks mass support on election day but not mass membership. What follows from that, structurally?

   The party is more responsive to voters, since it must re-earn support every cycleThe party is cheaper to run, which is why both parties chose the modelNothing inside the party rewards building a policy the members would hold you to, because there are no members between electionsThe party will eventually split, because a small circle cannot contain competing ambitions

3. Kerkvliet's standing objection to the patron-client framework is that it tends to reify if not valorize reciprocity. Why does the course carry the objection rather than dropping it?

   Because the framework is American in origin and the course prefers Filipino scholarshipBecause Kerkvliet's fieldwork disproved the existence of vertical ties in Philippine politicsBecause a framework with an unanswered objection cannot be used at allBecause reciprocity is genuinely observable, so the honest position is that kinship obligation is a resource the structure exploits rather than the cause that generates it

4. Someone tells you Filipinos vote for personalities because they are not serious about politics. Using the two beats, what is the reply?

   They do vote for the person. Now look at what else was on offer, from two parties with no programme, no membership and no reason to build one, where the only thing on the table that ever arrived was the thing the man himself handed overIt is condescending to describe voters that way, and the claim should be set asideVoters everywhere vote for personalities, so the observation says nothing about the PhilippinesSocial Weather Stations data shows the typical Filipino voter is conscientious, which settles the question

Check answers

You can move on when you can… explain why 16 national elections in 25 years produced no policy competition, using the cadre party structure and the patron-client tie, and state the standing objection to that framework.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Next up: 1.7 · When the state became the looter, where one man stops competing inside this system and takes ownership of it.
• Teehankee 2002 is the free PDF this lesson is built on, and it is readable in an evening. The History research map carries the page references and the full quotation chain, so you can pull any line above back to its page number without rereading the whole survey.
• The unresolved question this lesson hands forward, whether kinship obligation causes any of this or is merely used by it, is answered with Filipino scholarship in 2.1 · There is no line where you end and they begin. It is worth knowing now that the answer exists, because carrying an open question through two more history lessons is uncomfortable.