Clientelism ahead

What type of politics will emerge should this government manage to clean house in the next three years?

In other words, what political regime will likely form should scores of politicians get the boot for the flood control thievery.

Going by our political history, however, and the slow pace of democratic change here, the probable answer is that by the 2028 elections the country will revert to the traditional elite-backed clientelist politics.

It has happened before, especially after abhorrent predatory regimes — regimes where massive corruption and plunder were the core phenomenon — strangled our politics, as in now.

Broadly speaking, clientelism is the exchange of goods and services for political support. It is closely related to patronage politics.

Now, patronage politics flourished in the country after 1946, says political scientist Nathan Quimpo, where the economic elites served as the chief patrons of clientelist political parties that more or less practiced traditional patron-client and other personalistic relations, as well as the offering of jobs and other favors, to secure mass support.

But Marcos Sr.’s martial law regime ended elite-backed clientelism. In its place, Marcos Sr. instituted what political scientists called “patrimonial” or “neo-patrimonial authoritarianism.”

Patrimonialism is a form of politics in which authority is based primarily on the personal power exercised by a ruler, either directly or indirectly.

By centralizing power, Marcos Sr. ruthlessly quashed all opposition and controlled political patronage from top to bottom.

During the post-Marcos years, however, the return of clientelist politics did not “make much of a dent on elite hegemony” over politics despite the 1986 uprising, Quimpo writes.

“The congressional and local elections of 1987-88 saw the comeback of many politicians and political clans of the pre-authoritarian era — ‘the return of the oligarchs.’ And it seemed that nothing much in their behavior had changed since the clientelist politics of the 1960s,” Quimpo added.

Soon enough, such “clientelist electoral regimes” decayed into predatory regimes, particularly during the Estrada and Arroyo eras.

While old-style clientelist politics also leads to corruption, government rules and regulations usually manage to keep the corruption in check.

But, as both the Estrada and Arroyo predatory regimes showed, checks are easily overwhelmed. “Clientelism and patronage gave in to pervasive corruption, the systematic plunder of government resources, and the rapid erosion of public institutions into becoming tools for predation.”

The Noynoy Aquino regime, however, managed to reverse the earlier predatory regimes and bought some relief with his version of benign clientelism.

But with the election of neo-authoritarian, patrimonial Duterte — whose people made fortunes amid the brutal anti-drugs bloodlust — a predatory regime made a roaring comeback.

As for Marcos Jr., he now has to personally confront a current predatory regime of greedy government officials and of avaricious dynastic politicians.

“From the evidence revealed in congressional hearings, while big-time corruption erupted during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, it flourished during the Marcos administration’s first three years in office. The young Marcos cannot escape responsibility for it. The kindest interpretation is that he underestimated its extent when he dared to address it in his State of the Nation Address last July. The harsher view is that he tolerated it until confronted by the sheer brazenness of ghost projects,” as sociologist Randy David recently pointed out.

Whatever the case may be, Marcos Jr. can still claim he didn’t make worse the predatory regime he’s facing; and which may yet make him see the return of a clientelist regime, which incidentally might not be a Duterte clone.