Three things the anti-dynasty debate gets wrong about power

Most laws fail because they are weak. Our anti-dynasty debate risks failing for a subtler reason: It misunderstands its subject.

After nearly four decades of constitutional inaction, Congress has finally begun formal deliberations on political dynasty reform. On Jan. 27, the House of Representatives opened hearings on a set of anti-dynasty bills, including the leadership-backed House Bill No. 6771. A day later, the Senate followed with parallel discussions, pairing anti-dynasty proposals with long-overdue scrutiny of the party-list system. President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos has described anti-dynasty legislation as a priority, lending the moment a sense of urgency amid corruption scandals and declining public trust.

The development is real. So is the risk.

What is striking about the current debate is not a lack of proposals—there are many, and some are serious—but the persistence of a shared assumption about how power works. Across much of the discussion, dynasties are treated as a problem of proximity: who runs alongside whom, who occupies office at the same time, who shares a surname on the ballot. Power, in this telling, is spatial.

But dynastic power is not primarily spatial. It is temporal.

To see why, it helps to look not only at what the leading bills prohibit, but at what the debate itself assumes.

Power is dangerous not because it's shared but because it endures

Much of the anti-dynasty discourse remains preoccupied with simultaneity. It worries about siblings holding office at the same time, spouses appearing on the same ballot, relatives crowding a single jurisdiction. The instinct is understandable. Overlap is visible. It feels improper.

But dynasties do not survive by clustering. They survive by outlasting.

Political power becomes dynastic not when relatives sit together, but when office becomes predictable—when voters know, years in advance, which surname will appear next. The danger is not overlap. It is continuity.

This is why term limits have never broken Philippine dynasties. They merely taught them choreography. One relative exits, another enters. Power never leaves the family; it simply changes seats. When reform focuses only on simultaneity, it leaves this choreography untouched. It regulates collisions, not inheritance.

In doing so, the debate mistakes power for a seating arrangement.

Power isn't horizontal; it's vertical, and the debate pretends otherwise

Another persistent assumption is that power operates within neat, comparable categories: national, provincial, local. Offices are imagined as parallel lanes.

Stay in your lane, and the system remains balanced. But power does not move horizontally. It stacks.

A single family can lawfully occupy the entire vertical spine of government at once: a national official at the top, provincial executives below, legislators across districts, mayors throughout cities and municipalities, and barangay officials anchoring the base. No rule is violated. No principle is formally breached. Yet the result is a tightly integrated structure of influence.

This is not diffusion of authority. It is vertical integration.

Public policy scholars have long warned about this form of entrenchment. In a 2019 working paper from the Ateneo School of Government, Ronald Mendoza and his colleagues showed that Philippine dynasties are not merely numerous; they are expansive. Some families field multiple relatives simultaneously across levels of government—what the study memorably calls “fat” and “obese” dynasties—precisely because influence multiplies when it is layered.

Yet much of the current debate treats authority as a collection of isolated offices rather than as a system that rewards coordination across levels.

The irony is hard to miss. Nearly four out of five district representatives belong to political families. In the Senate, 16 to 20 out of 24 members do. Even the party-list system—now under renewed scrutiny—has not been immune to elite capture. The legislature debating dynastic reform remains structurally dynastic.

Power isn't a name—it's a pipeline

Perhaps the most revealing feature of the debate is its fixation on definitions. Relatives are enumerated with legal precision: spouses, siblings, ascendants, descendants, cousins, in-laws—often up to the fourth civil degree. The effort is meticulous.

But dynasties are not sustained by surnames alone. They are sustained by pipelines: access to party machinery, donors, name recall, local enforcement, and administrative memory. These pipelines persist even when the officeholder changes.

This explains why earlier anti-dynasty efforts faltered. The problem was never Congress' inability to define a dynasty. It was its reluctance to interrupt transmission. Proposals that sought to regulate succession—to bar relatives from contesting offices recently vacated by family members—repeatedly stalled.

Since 1987, nearly every Congress has produced some form of anti-dynasty bill. Most died quietly in committee. A few passed one chamber and disappeared in the other. The pattern is familiar: reforms that threaten continuity rarely survive long enough to be celebrated.

Comparative politics offers a cautionary tale. Early anti-dynasty laws in parts of Latin America focused, as much of our debate still does, on simultaneity.

Families adapted. Offices rotated. Dynasties endured. Countries that later achieved more durable reform learned that unless succession is addressed, reform becomes ceremonial.

Colombia’s experience is particularly instructive. In a study, economists Daron Acemoglu, María Angélica Bautista, Pablo Querubín, and James Robinson challenged the assumption that economic inequality alone dooms development. Studying nineteenth-century municipalities, they found that what proved most corrosive was political inequality—the concentration of power in a few hands. Where offices rotated but authority remained monopolized by the same families, inequality hardened over time.

Albert Hirschman anticipated this dynamic decades earlier. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, he described what he called the perversity thesis: the tendency of reform to produce outcomes that entrench, rather than undo, the very conditions they seek to remedy. Institutions signal responsiveness. Laws are passed. And the underlying structure of power remains intact—sometimes stronger for having adapted.

A serious anti-dynasty reform would begin with a more unsettling premise: that power is temporal, layered, and transmissible. It would regulate succession across terms, limit how many close relatives may hold elective office within a jurisdiction, and close the polite loopholes through which authority is passed on schedule.

This is not radicalism. It is realism of a different kind.

The Constitution did not worry about relatives bumping into one another in government corridors. It worried about democracy quietly becoming genealogical.

The question confronting us now is not whether Congress can debate anti-dynasty reform. It clearly can. The harder question is whether the debate is prepared to confront power as it actually operates—patient, adaptive, and very good at waiting.