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Friday, March 29, 2024

How bad is ‘not bad’?

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"What about the findings of this research?"

 

Political dynasties are “not bad” and are here to stay, President Duterte said in a recent speech in Surigao del Norte.

Speaking at the inauguration of a bridge, the President addressed himself to a province in which the congressman, the governor and the provincial administrator all had the same last name.

“You know, no offense intended, we are all the same,” said Duterte, whose daughter and son are mayor and vice mayor of his bailiwick, Davao City, and whose other son is a congressman representing Davao’s 1st District.

“But the provision in the Constitution about political dynasty, it will never push through no matter how hard they try,” the president added.

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“Unless you change the whole picture, unless you change the Constitution, unless you change the culture — then maybe you can. But if we stay like this, we will have dynasties. And dynasties are not bad,” he said.

The constitutional provision that the President was referring to was Section 26 of Article II, which is a declaration of principles and state policies. It reads: “The State shall guarantee equal access to opportunities for public service, and prohibit political dynasties as may be defined by law.”

But Congress, which is dominated by powerful political families, has thwarted this constitutional provision for more than three decades, simply by never passing a law that defines what a political dynasty is. With an estimated 70 percent of Congress belonging to one of many influential political families, it is small wonder that not a single anti-political dynasty bill has been passed since 1987.

But like the President, people who belong in a dynasty argue that it is not all too bad to let the people decide who they want in office—and if they all have the same last names, so be it.

Others argue that banning political dynasties would deprive society of qualified and competent officials, simply because they come from the same family.

None of these arguments, however, address the constitutional mandate that states dynasties should be prohibited as a matter of state policy.

None of them, too, address the findings of a 2012 empirical analysis of political dynasties conducted by researchers from the Asian Institute of Management and the Ateneo de Manila University that found that jurisdictions with political dynasties “are characterized by lower standards of living, lower human development, and higher levels of deprivation and inequality.”

In their paper “Inequality in democracy: Insights from an empirical analysis of political dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress,” Ronald U. Mendoza , Edsel L. Beja Jr , Victor S. Venida & David B. Yap found that “measures of poverty incidence, poverty gap and poverty severity are consistently higher in districts with dynastic legislators compared to other areas.”

“Specifically, jurisdictions with dynastic legislators tend to have poverty incidence that is five percentage points, poverty gap that is one percentage point, and poverty severity that is half a percentage point higher than other areas,” the paper observes. “Not surprisingly, the average income of districts with dynastic representatives is lower than those with non-dynastic representatives.”

Is this, we wonder, what the President meant when he said political dynasties are “not bad”?

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