Open Pulitiklan.com and the country turns into a field of colored dots. Each one is a province or city, and each opens into a list of surnames and the relatives in public office who share them. “Kapag ang public office, family business,” the site says under its logo.
As of Tuesday, the site counted 745 documented family networks and 2,873 profiles across 124 provinces and cities, last updated Sept. 12. It links every relationship to a published source and adds that the links “do not imply wrongdoing.” Being related to someone in office isn’t a crime. But seeing it all on one map raises a question that’s older than any of today’s officials: why do Filipinos keep handing power to the same families?
What the Map Shows
Pulitiklan ranks its “largest documented networks” by how many relatives are in office right now. The Singson family of Ilocos Sur is first, with 18 of its 30 documented relatives currently serving. It’s followed by the Mangudadatu–Sakaluran network of Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao del Sur (15), the Ampatuan family of Maguindanao del Sur (14), and the Dy–Tan family of Isabela (13). Cavite’s page alone lists 20 family networks and 88 officials.
Small towns show the same pattern. In San Esteban, Ilocos Sur, the site documents a brother and sister who have held the town’s top two posts since 2019, swapping the mayor and vice mayor seats in 2025. It’s perfectly legal, and it shows how one family can hold both of a town’s top jobs at once.
The site also notes its limits. “Research depth varies by place,” it says, and some provinces, such as Ifugao and Batanes, are marked “relationship research incomplete.” So the real count is probably higher.
A Weak State, Strong Families
In 1994, historian Alfred W. McCoy offered a diagnosis that still holds up. In his introduction to An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines, he wrote that “the Philippines has a long history of strong families assuring social survival when the nation-state is weak.” The phrase in the title belongs to anthropologist Robert Fox, who had described the country in the 1950s as “an anarchy of families.”
McCoy’s argument is practical, not sentimental. “After generations of experience, Filipinos have learned to rely upon their families for the sorts of social services that the state provides in many developed nations,” he wrote. Political families then turned public office into private advantage. They traded votes for licenses, cheap credit and favors, a process economists call rent-seeking. “Simply put,” McCoy wrote, “privatization of public resources strengthens a few fortunate families while weakening the state’s resources and its bureaucratic apparatus.” That made a cycle: a weak state made families stronger, and strong families kept the state weak.
He also points to history. American colonial officials “built electoral politics from the municipality upward, thereby entrenching provincial families in both local and national offices.”
Clans, Not Parties
Political scientist Julio C. Teehankee of De La Salle University picks up the argument in Patronage Democracy in the Philippines (2022), which he co-edited with Cleo Anne A. Calimbahin. “Clans, not parties, have been the building blocks of politics” in the Philippines, he writes, quoting his own earlier work. “In the absence of clear socio-economic cleavages and the weakness of the state, the family persists as a primary unit of political organization.”
Teehankee says political offices become a family inheritance, or pamana, and he calls this ipinamanang kapangyarihan, or inherited power. He cites his own count of 319 political clans in Philippine history. Of these, 234 (73%) still dominated in the 2019 midterm elections, and 220 (70%) had held local posts for at least two decades. He also cites research by Pablo Querubin: incumbent congressmen and governors are five times more likely to have a relative serve in those same offices later than candidates who narrowly lost. The result, he concludes, is that local politics “has mutated into a virulent form of patronage democracy.”
Other data point the same way. The Ateneo School of Government found that “fat” dynasties, where several relatives hold office at the same time, grew from 19% of all local posts in 1988 to 29% in 2019, and from 57% of governors in 2004 to 80% in 2019. After the May 2025 elections, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) counted 71 of 82 governors as members of political families.
Kapwa and Its Shadow
Laws and money explain a lot. They don’t explain why so many voters feel at home with dynasties. For that, some thinkers look to Filipino psychology.
Virgilio Enriquez, regarded as the father of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, made kapwa its core idea. He described it as “a recognition of shared identity, an inner self shared with others.” He also drew a line between ibang-tao (outsiders) and hindi ibang-tao (one of us). Carl Lorenz Cervantes, a psychologist at UP Diliman, goes further. He argues that Filipino psychology “goes beyond the limits of the individual bodily experience” and that “it includes other people (kapwa) and nature.” He calls this “Kapwa Ecology.”
That idea of the self is generous, but it has a flip side. In 1988, a Senate task force led by psychologist Patricia Licuanan wrote its Moral Recovery Program report and observed: “We find pakikipagkapwa-tao and the kanya-kanya mentality living comfortably together in us.” The report found that too much concern for family shows up in “factionalism, patronage, and political dynasties” and “acts as a block to national consciousness.”
“Kanya-Kanya, Pero sa Kapwa Ko, Pamilya Ko”
Put these threads together and a pattern comes into view. Kapwa runs deep in Filipinos. At its widest, it reaches past other people to nature and, for many, to the spirit world. But when survival feels threatened, that wide circle tightens. Its shadow is kanya-kanya.
Filipino kanya-kanya isn’t Western individualism, though. It rarely means one person looking out only for themselves. The self stays part of a larger whole: the family, the extended family, the clan. Each to their own, but “my own” means my kin. Kanya-kanya, pero sa kapwa ko, pamilya ko.
Seen this way, the dynasty looks less like an accident and more like a survival strategy with deep roots. For centuries before 1521, the family and the kin group were what kept people fed, protected and connected. The more a Filipino feels provided for and protected by the clan, the tighter the attachment becomes. A candidate from a familiar family can feel less like a stranger asking for power and more like hindi ibang-tao.
That history needs care. Historians broadly agree that no single state ruled the whole archipelago in 1521. People lived in barangay communities under datu, alongside larger polities such as the Sulu sultanate and port kingdoms like Tondo and Sugbu (Cebu). The idea of one Filipino nation took shape much later, in the 19th century. For most of that long history, loyalty ran to kin and community, not to a country that didn’t exist yet. McCoy’s work also suggests the Philippines doesn’t fit neatly into a generic “Asian” mold. He contrasts Filipino bilateral kinship, traced through both parents, with the Chinese patrilineal family. But he notes that kinship is bilateral “in most parts of Southeast Asia,” so we share the pattern with our neighbors.
Culture isn’t the whole story, either. Teehankee, reviewing earlier culture-based explanations, notes that they “tend to reify, if not valorize” kinship and reciprocity. McCoy finds the more direct cause in institutions such as colonial elections and a state that couldn’t deliver. Read together, the two views fit. Kanya-kanya pero pamilya ko is how a survival instinct sounds when the state isn’t there. Licuanan’s task force said the same: “The absence of government enhances our extreme family-and even community-centeredness.”
Will Dynasties Always Prevail?
If dynasties are rooted this deeply, it’s tempting to conclude that they will always win. Recent events push back on that. In 2025, PCIJ reported, 12 dynasties lost governors’ races. Voters in Cebu, Catanduanes, Laguna, and Marinduque chose governors not known to come from political families. Since 2016, the Sangguniang Kabataan Reform Act has barred SK officials related within the second civil degree to incumbent elected officials in their locality. It’s the only nationwide anti-dynasty rule in force.
The 1987 Constitution already orders the State to “prohibit political dynasties as may be defined by law” (Art. II, Sec. 26). For 39 years, Congress never passed that law. On Sept. 16, the Supreme Court announced a unanimous ruling that this inaction was grave abuse of discretion. It ordered Congress to act “at the earliest opportunity.” The House passed House Bill 8389 on June 3, 267-20. The Senate’s version, Senate Bill 1901, is still pending on second reading, and the current session ends Oct. 9. Both bills reach only relatives up to the second civil degree. Critics say that leaves out cousins, uncles and nieces.
Widening the Circle
If kapwa shrinks to the clan when people feel unsafe, a law alone won’t fix it. But the diagnosis also suggests a cure. Families became the safety net because the state wasn’t one. When public hospitals, schools, jobs and courts work for everyone, regardless of surname, people need the clan less to get by.
The harder work is inside us. Enriquez’s kapwa never asked whether someone was a relative. The task now is to widen hindi ibang-tao, “one of us,” from pamilya ko to bayan ko. Pulitiklan shows who is related to whom. The next question is whether Filipinos can start treating the whole country as kapwa.
