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Oligarchs and Cronies in the Philippine State the Politics of Patrimonial Plunder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

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Abstract

Five years after the downfall of Ferdinand E. Marcos, scholars of Philippine politics have yet to achieve even minimal consensus on the proper characterization of his authoritarian regime. More importantly, scholarship has failed to account for fundamental continuity, across regimes, in the way in which dominant economic interests interact with the Philippine state. The author argues that a focus on patrimonial aspects of the Philippine state will not only bring a greater sense of coherence to many disparate aspects of Marcos's rule, but will also lead to clearer understanding of enduring characteristics of the Philippine political economy. Throughout the postwar years, political administration is often treated as a personal affair, and the assignment of privileges granted by the state is largely determined by the personal discretion of those oligarchs currently holding official position. The article explores factors that help to explain why there has been no effective pressure from either domestic or external forces to undermine the patrimonial features of the state, and suggests that future research should analyze why patrimonial features have persisted in the Philippines despite enormous change, yet elsewhere seem to have subsided in the face of change.

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Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1991

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References

1 For a neoclassical perspective on competitive rent seeking, see Krueger, Anne O., “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society,” American Economic Review 64 (June 1974), 291303.Google Scholar

2 Koike, Kenji, “Dismantling Crony Capitalism under the Aquino Government,” in All Ishii, chiro et al., National Development Policies and the Business Sector in the Philippines (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1988), 255.Google Scholar

3 In “the genuinely patrimonial office,” Weber writes, “the political administration … is treated as a purely personal affair of the ruler, and political power is considered part of his personal property.” Weber, , Economy and Society, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 3:1028–29.Google Scholar Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent references are to vol. 3.

4 Ibid., 1041; emphasis in original.

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6 Weber (fn. 3), 1028.

7 My definition of the state derives from the incisive discussion of postcolonial African states found in Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G., “Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35 (October 1982), 124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar They go beyond Weber's classic “empirical” definition of the state (“a corporate group that has compulsory jurisdiction, exercises continuous organization, and claims a monopoly of force over a territory and its population, including ‘all action taking place in the area of its jurisdiction’ ”) (p. 2) and argue the need to incorporate also the “juridical” definition of statehood, that which is recognized by the “international society of states.” In Europe, they argue, “empirical statehood preceded juridical statehood or was concurrent with it.” In Black Africa and other parts of the Third World, however, there has been a very different sort of state-building process: “External factors are more likely than internal factors to provide an adequate explanation of the formation and persistence of states” (p. 23). “A political system may possess some or all of the empirical qualifications of statehood, but without the [internationally recognized] juridical attributes of territory and independence it is not a state” (p. 13).

8 This parallels Guenther Roth's discussion of a “detraditionalized” patrimonialism that “becomes the dominant form of government” in “some of the newer states.” Even in industrialized countries, he writes, this “personal rulership … is apparently enlarged by the extension of government functions”; Roth, , “Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in the New States,” World Politics 20 (January 1968), 194206, at 196, 199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Weber (fn. 3), 1002–3, discusses the historical “march of bureaucracy.”

9 Weber (fn. 3), 1088 and 1059.

10 The formation and persistence of a central state that is unable to exert authority effectively over “local lords” can only be understood in light of external factors: (1) an American colonial heritage that aborted what might have been a more “natural,” Latin American-style caudillo route to state formation and superimposed a weak central state over a polity of quite autonomous local centers of power; and (2) an “international society of states” that helps ensure the survival of central states that cannot, empirically, claim control over much of their territories. See Anderson, Benedict, “Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review 169 (May-June 1988), 333, at 9–13Google Scholar; and Jackson and Rosberg (fn. 7).

11 Weber (fn 3), of course, develops “pure” categories and then permits hybrid characterizations of his historical cases. In his analysis of bureaucratic systems, for example, he notes cases with “strong patrimonial elements” and “patrimonial admixtures” (p. 964). It is in this spirit that I use the terms “patrimonial features” and “patrimonial elements.”

My analysis has benefited from two works that provide excellent, historically based analyses of patrimonial dynamics in other postcolonial settings: Crouch, Harold, “Patrimonialism and Military Rule in Indonesia,” World Politics 31 (July 1979), 571–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Callaghy, Thomas M., The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).Google Scholar Some scholars find patrimonial features in modern First World bureaucracies as well. See the very insightful “revisionist” approach to Weber's ideal-typical bureaucratic state in Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, “Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy,” World Politics 31 (January 1979), 195227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Robin Theobald, by contrast, seeks to confine the patrimonial framework to underdeveloped economies; see Theobald, , “Patri-monialism,” World Politics 34 (July 1982), 548–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 “No relation to President Corazon C. Aquino,” it is noted in the foreword to her book.

13 Nemenzo, , “The Left and the Traditional Opposition,” in May, R. J. and Nemenzo, Francisco, eds., The Philippines after Marcos (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 50.Google Scholar

14 Tiglao, , “The Consolidation of the Dictatorship,” in Dios, Aurora Javate-de et al., eds., Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of Peoples's Power (Metro Manila: Conspectus Foundation Incorporated, 1988), 27, 31Google Scholar (quote from p. 27).

15 Stauffer, , “The Political Economy ofRefeudalization,” in Rosenberg, David A., ed., Marcos and Martial Law in the Philippines (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 217.Google Scholar

16 Wolters, , Politics, Patronage and Class Conflict in Central Luzon (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1984), 3.Google Scholar

17 Crouch, Harold, Economic Change, Social Structure and the Political System in Southeast Asia: Philippine Development Compared with the Other ASEAN Countries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1985), 1018CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at 10.

18 See Corpuz, Onofre D., The Bureaucracy in the Philippines (Manila: University of the Philippines Institute of Public Administration, 1957), 249.Google Scholar

19 Anderson (fn. 10), 11–12. One of the best prewar illustrations of an oligarchic raid on the state machinery is the sugar bloc's unbridled assault on the loans department of the newly formed Philippine National Bank, between 1916 and 1920. See Stanley, Peter W., A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1890–1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 233–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Doeppers, Daniel F., Manila, 1900–1941: Social Change in a Late Colonial Metropolis, Monograph Series No. 27 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1984), 72.Google Scholar See also Hutchcroft, Paul D., “A State Besieged: Historical Patterns of State-Elite Relations in the Philippines,” Issues and Letters (Philippine Center for Policy Studies) 1, no. 4 (1990), 110.Google Scholar

21 Golay, , The Philippines: Public Policy and National Economic Development (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), 7172.Google Scholar

22 As Weber (fn. 3) writes, “The patrimonial office lacks above all the bureaucratic separation of the ‘private’ and the ‘Official’ sphere” (p. 1028).

23 There are two explanations commonly given for this postindependence change: (1) increased corruption in the bureaucracy during the Japanese occupation and the early postwar years; and (2) the birth of the two-party system, injecting more partisan considerations into the spoils system. See Corpuz (fn. 18), 224–25, 237–48. A third reason is perhaps most important: what Anderson calls the “American ringmaster for domestic political competition” played a less prominent role after 1946; Anderson (fn. 10), 14.

24 Scott, James C., “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia,” in Schmidt, Steffen W. et al., eds., Friends, Followers and Factions (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977), 137 and 143.Google Scholar Thomas C. Nowak and Kay A. Snyder explain that the “growing penetration of national bureaucratic institutions into local areas heightens the dependence of the local elite upon office-based resources”; Nowak, and Snyder, , “Clientelist Politics in the Philippines: Integration or Instability,” American Political Science Review 68 (September 1974), 1147–70, at 1151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Brian Fegan's discussion of how the closing of the land frontier made civil service positions a more important element of patron-client largesse in the postwar years-and led to a process of “bureaucratic involution” on the national level; Fegan, , “The Social History of a Central Luzon Barrio,” in McCoy, Alfred W. and Jesus, Ed. C. de, eds., Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982), 119–24.Google Scholar An influential early work on patron-client relations in the Philippines is Lande, Carl H., Leaders, Factions, and Parties: The Structure of Philippine Politics, Monograph Series No. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1966).Google Scholar

25 As one scholar wrote in the 1950s, “Business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government”; McHale, Thomas R., “An Econecological Approach to Economic Development” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1959), 217Google Scholar, quoted in Stifel, Laurence Davis, The Textile Industry: A Case Study of Industrial Development in the Philippines, Data Paper Number 49 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1963), 50.Google Scholar

26 The “rent-seeking society” in the Philippines is further discussed in Montes, “The Business Sector and Development Policy,” in Ishii et al. (fn. 2), 23–77. As he points out, “rents” can include “protection from competition through quotas, tariffs, and measured capacities, subsidized credit, access to foreign reparations, loans, and grants. … [I]n a rent-seeking society, the operations of the state determine the assignment of and the continued enjoyment of economic advantages” (p. 65).

27 Stifel (fn. 25), 104.

28 Theda Skocpol writes that “states conceived as organizations claiming control over territories and people may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society. This is what is usually meant by ‘state autonomy.’ Unless such independent goal formulation occurs, there is little need to talk about states as important actors”; Skocpol, , “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Evans, Peter B. et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9.Google Scholar

While it may be rare to speak of the Philippine state as an independent actor vis-à-vis dominant interests, the state nevertheless remains central to any comprehensive analysis of the country's political economy. As noted at the outset, access to the state apparatus is the primary means of private accumulation. It is indeed paradoxical that a “weak” state should be a central subject of analysis (and, as noted above, that analysis of the state must begin outside the state). The state's important role seems to derive primarily from responsibilities it has necessarily assumed in handling the country's external economic relations: it disburses aid and loans received from abroad and sets policies on foreign exchange, trade, and investment. In such a paradoxical situation, we must begin our analysis with an examination of the nature of dominant interests and proceed from there to develop a clearer picture of the state with which they interact.

29 Even Hawes seems to acknowledge this, despite the apparent inconsistency with his thesis about “the state” acting against “elite segments”: “Occasionally individual families were singled out and made an example so that others might see what fate awaited those deemed to be enemies of the president” (p. 127).

30 McCoy, , “The Lopez Family: From Provincial Elite to National Oligarchy,” in Cullinane, Michael, ed., Philippine Politicai Families (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for South and Southeast Asia, University of Michigan, forthcoming)Google Scholar; emphasis added.

31 Stauffer (fn. 15), 193. Behind Hawes's “elite segments” seems to be the notion that production for the domestic market (or import-substitution industrialization) is generally nationalist, while production for external markets is not (see p. 45). The difficulty here is that foreign capital has played a central role in Philippine isi from the beginning (which Hawes actually acknowledges, p. 33). See Maxfield, Sylvia and Nolt, James H., “Protectionism and the Internationalization of Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina,” International Studies Quarterly 34 (March 1990), 4981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Moreover, Montes points to the commonality of interest between Filipino firms and foreign firms that are protected by the same “tariff walls and protectionist measures”; Montes, Manuel F., “Financing Development: The ‘Democratic’ Approach versus the ‘Corporatist’ Approach in the Philippines,” in Urrutia, Miguel et al., eds., The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1989), 98.Google Scholar

Interestingly, if one is looking for coherent segments of capital based on different economic interests, it can best be found in analyzing foreign capital. There, Montes points out, one can see a clear differentiation between foreign capital inside the tariff walls and foreign capital located outside the country (p. 98).

32 Montes (fn. 31), 90.

33 Interview, Wilhelm G. Ortaliz, former director, Bureau of Industrial Coordination, Ministry of Industry, April 26, 1989. Ortaliz explained that his job during the early 1980s was to “strengthen industrial associations within the private sector. … [B]ut it was hard for the government to know who to work with.” He described the largest business association, the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industries (formed in the late 1970s), as a mere “post office” of diverse concerns, very “personality-oriented” and unable to formulate common positions on major issues.

Economist Montes similarly explains that government-private sector “consultations are dominated by the need to protect individual interests. … The private sector does not have a well-defined interest as a private sector (or as larger groups within the private sector). This protecting of individual interests also involves the need to have advance information of the government's intentions. … Access to information tends to be individual, based on kinship and other ties”; see Montes (fn. 31), 108.

Indeed, one can say that quasi-patrimonial features (mirroring those found at the level of the state) are found within business associations, as personal interests usually win out over associational interests.

34 Nowak and Snyder (fn. 24) explain that “diversification of familial economic power decreases susceptibility to fluctuations in world prices, potential loss of privileges in the U.S. market, and local policy changes such a devaluation, which hurt some sectors more than others” (pp. 1148–49). They also note the important, but often neglected, role of urban real estate in diversification strategies.

There is one other reason for diversification that should be added to their list: in an economy in which wealth depends to such a large degree on access to the state machinery, diversification helps to guard against the uncertainties of change in political leadership. A family cannot depend exclusively on investments assisted by current friends in the Palace, for example, because in the next administration those investments may be jeopardized by a lack of necessary connections in key government offices.

35 De Dios (fn. 5), 112.

36 Abueva, Jose Veloso, “The Philippines: Tradition and Change,” Asian Survey 10, no. 1 (1970), 5664, at 62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Scott (fn. 24), 143. The revenue problems are systemic:

A regime that is dependent on its particularistic distributive capacity … [will] have a most difficult time raising revenue from internal taxation. A rise in direct taxation would threaten their base of support, and in fact, they are notorious for the undercollection of revenues due them, since favors to their clients often take the form of either leaving them off local tax rolls or ignoring debts they owe the government, (p. 143)

38 Nowak and Snyder (fn. 24), 1151–54.

39 See Bautista, Romeo M., Power, John H., and Associates, Industrial Promotion Policies in the Philippines (Metro Manila: Philippine Institute for Development Studies, 1979), 59Google Scholar; and Montes (fn. 31), 88–89.

40 As Scott (fn. 24) explains:

Democratic regimes which must cater to the strong distributive pressures generated by their clientele are thus particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of world prices for primary products on which their budgets depend. … [A] stagnating economy or declining world prices threatened the entire structure they had pieced together, (p. 143)

41 Anderson (fn. 10), 18.

42 See Nowak and Snyder (fn. 24), 1170.

43 Tiglao (fn. 14), 38.

44 For enlightening scholarship on this process, see Paredes, Ruby R., ed., Philippine Colonial Democracy, Monograph No. 32 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1989).Google Scholar

45 For a particularly well documented account of this history, see Shalom, Stephen Rosskamm, The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981).Google Scholar

46 Raymond Bonner gives a good account of how the Marcoses maneuvered in Washington circles; see Bonner, , Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Mailing of American Policy (New York: Times Books, 1987).Google Scholar

47 Anderson (fn. 10), 21.

48 Haggard, Stephan, “The Political Economy of the Philippine Debt Crisis,” in Nelson, Joan, ed., Economic Crisis and Policy Choice: The Politics of Adjustment in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 219.Google Scholar

49 Overholt, William H., “Pressures and Policies: Prospects for Cory Aquino's Philippines,” in Lande, Carl H., ed., Rebuilding a Nation: Philippine Challenges and American Policy (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute Press, 1987), 98.Google Scholar

50 Two years later, in fact, Marcos declared that the “KBL [New Society Movement, Mar-cos's political party] Central Committee, not the technocrats, make government policy” (Wurfel, 237 n. 8). The central committee included major cronies.

51 Broad explains at the outset that her primary theoretical reliance is upon the “new de-pendentistas,” especially Peter Evans's Dependent Development, but Evans's influence is not clearly evident in her analysis. The major weakness of earlier dependency analyses, she writes, “was the derivative position in which it placed the LDC state” (p. 16). But when all is said and done, Evans's “incontrovertible” assertion on “the centrality of the state to accumulation on the periphery” (p. 43) seems to have lost out to a focus more like that of Cheryl Payer, on how external institutions manage to overpower Third World states. See Evans, , Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Payer, , The Debt Trap: The International Monetary Fund and the Third World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and idem, The World Ban?: A Critical Analysis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).Google Scholar

52 Fabella, Raul V., “Trade and Industry Reforms in the Philippines: Process and Performance,” in Montes, Manuel F. and Sakai, Hideyoshi, Philippine Macroeconomic Perspective: Developments and Policies (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1989), 193.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 205.

54 Weber (fn. 3), 1099; emphasis added.

55 Problems with Broad's nationalist/transnationalist categorization arise not only with the cronies, of course, but also with noncrony businesspeople. Except for this one acknowledgment that the categories are “not strictly demarcated,” she generally seems to suggest that mere involvement with foreign capital taints local capital and “tends to wed them ideologically to policies furthering free international flow of goods and capital” (p. 7). Interestingly, one of her key examples of a besieged economic nationalist is Hilarion Henares, who she says “professed to have kept his hands clean of involvement with foreign corporations and foreign markets” (p. 115). In fact, Henares has long had close linkages with U.S. capital, though that seems to have had little impact on the nationalist views he regularly expresses in his popular newspaper column. Henares's business interests are discussed in Pomerov, William J., An American Made Tragedy: Neo-Colonialism and Dictatorship in the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 58.Google Scholar

56 Some speculate that Silverio's fall from grace was related to displeasure over the course of a romance between Silverio's son and Imee Marcos, the daughter of the First Couple.

As Weber (fn. 3) writes: “Because of its very nature patrimonialism was the specific locus for the rise of favoritism—of men close to the ruler who had tremendous power, but always were in danger of sudden, dramatic downfall for purely personal reasons” (p. 1088).

57 Thompson, Mark and Slayton, Gregory, “An Essay on Credit Arrangements between the IMF and the Republic of the Philippines: 1970–1983,” Philippine Review of Economics and Business 22, nos. 1 and 2 (1985), 5981, at 60 and 78.Google Scholar

58 Montes (fn. 31) 105, 110–11, 134.

59 Fabella (fn. 52), 197.

60 As de Dios writes: “There were many instances when the more ‘irrational,’ ‘inefficient,’ at times blatantly corrupt, aspects of the dictatorship were countenanced or accommodated by these institutions, particularly its net lending operations and crony bail-outs”; Dios, de, “The Erosion of the Dictatorship,” in Javate-de Dios (fn. 14), 122.Google Scholar

61 See Lamberte, Mario B., “Financial Liberalization: What Have We Learnt?Journal of Philippine Development 12, no. 2 (1985), 274–89Google Scholar; and Alburo, Florian and Shepherd, Geoffrey, “Trade Liberalization Experience in the Philippines, 1960–84,” Working Paper No. 86–07 (Manila: Philippine Institute of Development Studies, 1986).Google Scholar While both studies cite important initiatives in the early 1980s, they also show that liberalization efforts ultimately had little success. Lamberte diagnoses the “failure of recent liberalization efforts,” while Alburo and Shepherd explain that the ”1983 economic crisis … effectively aborted these fundamental changes in tariff structure and commercial policy” (p. 37). See also Montes (fn. 31), noil.

62 De Dios (fn. 60), 119–20.

63 De Dios (fn. 5), 115.

64 Anderson (fn. io), 22.

65 Wurfel thus confuses matters when he writes of “oligarch and crony” as an “elite cleavage on economic issues” (p. 238). A clearer way to express this division is “favored” (crony) versus “nonfavored” or “less-favored” (businessperson).

66 McCoy explains that the Lopezes achieved national prominence after independence, building on prewar provincial wealth that was liquidated during the war. In both the pre and postwar phases of their accumulation, “the viability of all Lopez investments … has depended upon state regulation and licensing.…Don Eugenio [Lopez] used capital to secure political protection, investing in political campaigns and taking his profits in favors”; see McCoy (fn. 30), 21–23. In effecti they raided the state from a strong and independent societal base.

67 Weber (fn. 3), 1102.

68 Marcos had unprecedented tenure in office and managed to grab control of military, judicial, and legislative functions that had previously been dispersed among many rival centers of power. The measure of protection previously available to those oligarchs “on the outs” therefore disappeared in 1972. See Anderson (fn. 10), 12, 22, on how the declaration of martial law upset the “rule of law” that had long guided the system of oligarchic hegemony.

69 The First Lady had a special explanation for the success of cronies and relatives: “Some are smarter than others” (Wurfel, 237).

70 On the importance of “personal dependence” to a patrimonial ruler, see Weber (fn. 3), 1026–27.

71 For example, Cojuangco, Disini, Silverio, Rodolfo Cuenca (the construction magnate), and Antonio Floirendo (the “banana king”) did not hold important official posts. Benedicto headed the quasi-public Philippine Sugar Commission, the central agency of the sugar monopoly. Major exceptions to the rule include Geronimo Velasco (energy minister) and Juan Ponce Enrile (defense minister). By the early 1980s Benedicto, Cojuangco, and Floirendo were made regional party chairmen of Marcos's Kilusang Bagong Lipunan, or New Society Movement (Wurfel, 237). See also de Dios (fn. 5), 114.

72 According to a former Marcos adviser, Imelda would threaten Marcos with exposure (of intimate details of life in the Palace) or a “big public divorce, and Marcos never wanted to call her bluff.” Interview, Cristobal, Adrian, former Special Assistant for Special Studies (to President Marcos), June 19, 1989.Google Scholar Wurfel describes it as a relationship of “mutual blackmail” (p. 241). An embroidered analysis of the relationship is found in Seagrave, Sterling, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

73 Weber (fn. 3), 1029; emphasis in original. He writes that “this quasi-jurisdictional limitation of the powers of office results primarily from the competing economic interests of the various patrimonial officials.”

74 Montes (fn. 31), 108.

75 Cristobal (fn. 72). Similarly, an (anti-Marcos) professional technician for the state-owned Philippine National Oil Company, decries the return of unbridled patronage within his company since 1986 and looks back with an ironic sense of fondness for what one Marcos crony, Geronimo Velasco, did to professionalize their operations. Unlike the leadership under Aquino, where professional qualifications matter little and “the envelope with a recommendation from a senator is key,” he exclaimed, “at least Velasco built up something worth plundering!”; anonymous interview, April 2, 1989.

76 Indeed, when in 1981 external funds became harder to come by, it was useful for Marcos to promote chief technocrat Virata. Wurfel should not take this as an indication that the technocrats were temporarily edging out the cronies (p. 254). The same year a more ideological technocrat, Economic Planning Minister Gerardo Sicat, was “fired for raising objections to the costly projects of the First Lady”; see Fabella (fn. 52), 197.

77 Interview, Tatad, Francisco S., former information minister (under President Marcos), August 22, 1989.Google Scholar In Weber's words, “The ruler's personal discretion delimits the jurisdiction of his officials”; Weber (fn. 3), 1029.

78 Weber (fn. 3), 1098; see also p. 1028.

79 Cardoso, , “On the Characterization of Authoritarian Regimes in Latin America,” in Collier, David, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 38.Google Scholar

80 Weber (fn. 3), 1042; emphasis in original.

81 While caudillos imposed personal orders by decree, Cardoso explains, most modern military regimes have a more bureaucratic, institutional basis of power; Cardoso (fn. 79), 35–36. The polity and economy from which the Marcos regime emerged is larger and seemingly more institutionalized and complex that that of most so-called “caudillos” of modern Latin America. Nevertheless, it is probably easier to draw comparisons with personalistic caudillo regimes (such as that of Somoza) than with the bureaucratic-authoritatian regimes of the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), where the military ruled as an institution. It would be a valuable project to explore further the similarities and differences between Marcos and the modern caudillos.

82 If one were to try to determine precisely where the Philippine case is situated amid more extreme cases of personalistic and bureaucratic authoritarianism, one would need to conduct careful comparative analysis of specific arenas of state policy. Within each arena, it would be necessary to determine whether there was any significant change over time in the degree of separation of “official” and “private” spheres. Obviously, such an effort is beyond the scope of this article.

83 State autonomy is defined above (fn. 28). State capacity, Kathryn Sikkink writes, “involves the administrative and coercive abilities of the state apparatus to implement official goals”; Sikkink, , “State Autonomy and Developmentalist Policy in Argentina and Brazil: Frondizi and Kubitschek Administrations Compared” (Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, 1988), 3Google Scholar, quoted with author's permission. In a system with clear-cut patrimonial elements, this definition needs to include not only “official goals,” but also the personal goals of the political leadership.

84 A largely parallel line of analysis is found in Haggard's insightful discussion of the nature of “weak authoritarian regimes”; he states that “technocrats may gain autonomy from interest group and legislative pressures under authoritarian rule, but they do not necessarily gain independence from the executive.” This executive has a “personal stake … in the crony enterprise”; Haggard (fn. 48), 217–18.

Of the works discussed in this article, Hawes's book alone devotes significant attention to state theory. But Wurfel, too, in his occasional mention of the subject, asserts that in the early years of martial law the state had “autonomy from the dominant class” (p. 333) and had the “capability to make and implement policy” in a way that was unresponsive “to interests outside the state structure” (p. 334). Only later did the “state [serve] the interests of the superpatron and his closest clients-the essence of neopatrimonialism” (p. 333). This “essence of neopatrimonialism,” I am arguing, was present from the beginning.

85 Weber (fn. 3), 998; emphasis added.

86 Weber (fn. 3), 1:240, 3:1091 and 1092. If Weber is the guide, this effectively refutes Montes's (fn. 26) assertion that “a ‘rent-seeking’ economy cannot readily be classified as capitalist” (p. 65). In Montes's analysis (fn. 31) the Philippines suffers from a “feudal social basis of political power” (p. 135).

87 Anderson (fn. 10), 20.

88 Weber (fn. 3), 1040.

89 The idea of inducement comes from Charles Lindblom's discussion of “the privileged position of business.” Although he focuses on advanced capitalist countries, there are nonetheless parallels to be found in Marcos's situation after 1972. Especially in the beginning the ruler's household controlled but a portion of the national economy, and Marcos needed to ensure (domestic and foreign) investors' confidence in general business conditions. See Lind-blom, , Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic System (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 170–88Google Scholar, quote from p. 174.

90 Weber (fn. 3), 1055; emphasis added.

91 Ibid., 1107.

92 Anderson (fn. 10), 22.

93 McCoy (fn. 30), Ms p. 45, quoting an affidavit of Oscar Lopez.

94 Ibid., 45–48.

95 Montes (fn. 31), 96, 114–15, 117, 120. Attempts at a more centralized patrimonial polity, then, did not resolve the revenue dilemmas faced in the pre-martial law period, when many oligarchic patrons competed in the electoral arena.

96 Doherty, John F., “Who Controls the Philippine Economy: Some Need Not Try as Hard as Others,” in Aquino, Belinda A., ed., Cronies and Enemies: The Current Philippine Scene, Philippine Studies Occasional Paper No. 5 (Honolulu: Philippine Studies Program, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii, 1982), 30.Google Scholar

97 See de Dios (fn. 60), 102–3. Broad attempts to link part of this elite opposition to the “national entrepreneurial class” (p. 105; see also p. 3). But a close examination of either the “bourgeois bombers,” to whom she is referring, or other major groups, especially the influential Makati Business Club, makes this implausible.

98 De Dios (fn. 5), 133.

99 Weber (fn. 5,), 1:239.

100 See the influential white paper of the University of the Philippines school of economics; Dios, Emmanuel S. de, ed., An Analysis of the Philippine Economic Crisis: A Workshop Report (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1984).Google Scholar

101 Haggard, Stephan, “The Philippines: Picking Up after Marcos,” in Vernon, Raymond, ed., The Promise of Privatization (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988), 93, 97.Google Scholar Within these enterprises, the public-private distinction was often blurred beyond recognition; as Haggard reports, prior to a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, “several managers of state-owned enterprises even denied that they were public officials!” (p. 95). See also Weber's discussion (fn. 3), 1097, of the extensive growth of state enterprises in patrimonial polities.

102 Weber (fn. 3), 1095.

103 Ibid.; emphasis in original.

104 ISI monopolists effectively control the policy-making agenda in the Aquino regime, and

international institutions seeking to push rationalizing or liberalizing strategies such as export-oriented industrialization are in the queer position of not having a clear constituency with political influence. … [T]he free-trade ideology … is being resisted by the traditional elite (now holding key positions in the government) who have been accustomed to privileged, rent-producing positions in the economy, (de Dios [fn. 5], 140–41)

As early as 1988 Haggard concluded that “barriers to rapid privatization emerged, and implementation has lagged behind state intentions.” In light of subsequent experience, this conclusion could now be stated even more forcefully. See Haggard (fn. 101), 92.

Economist Gustav Ranis, a longtime consultant on Philippine economic issues, wrote in 1989: “While the Philippines is certainly not alone in preferring [to avoid] … painful economic restructuring, it is undoubtedly one of the foremost practitioners of the art”; Ranis, , Far Eastern Economic Review, September 28, 1989, pp. 153–54, at 154.Google Scholar

Even the prosecution of Marcos cronies has been plagued with failure, and only a tiny portion of the “ill-gotten wealth” has been recovered. See the Philippine Daily Globe, December 16, 1989. Quite early on, in fact, the major agency tasked with the effort (the Philippine Commission on Good Government) was already being called a “tainted watchdog” because of alleged misappropriation of seized assets. See the Far Eastern Economic Review, September 17, 1987, pp. 22–27.

105 Weber (fn. 3), 1095. This is not to say, of course, that corruption is incompatible with advanced capitalism: one can think of myriad examples where the two thrive simultaneously. In Weber's analysis bribery and corruption have the “least serious effect” when they are calculable and become most onerous when fees are “highly variable” and “settled from case to case with every individual official” (vol. 1, p. 240). If correct, a major obstacle to the development of more sophisticated forms of capitalist accumulation is not corruption per se, but highly arbitrary corruption.

106 Manila Chronicle, June 11, 1989.

107 De Dios (fn. 5), 124.

108 CIA, Philippines: General Survey, National Intelligence Survey, NIS 99, July 1965 (sanitized copy released November 1980), excerpted in Schirmer, Daniel B. and Shalom, Stephen Ross-kamm, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 126.Google Scholar

109 See Crouch (fn. II); and Callaghy (fn. n).

110 As Gustave Ranis wrote in 1989, discussing the country's strong standing with the U.S. and Japan,

There is likely to he overwhelmingly strong “need to lend” for geo-political reasons, on the one hand, and for the “need to borrow” to avoid domestic adjustment, on the other. As a consequence the system will probably find it possible to continue its non-optimal growth path for some time to come. … [T]he very economic opportunity that the Philippines’ geo-political importance provides threatens to be the undoing of its political economy. (Ranis [fn. 104], 154)

111 As attested by the current research of John Sidel of Cornell University; see Sidel, , “Big Men with Bolos, Bosses, Bullets, Bank Loans, and Bus Companies: Local Power in Philippine Politics” (Unpublished manuscript, 1990).Google Scholar

112 When it comes to arrests of labor leaders or military harassment of peasant communities, of course, the state is very clearly an “independent actor” vis-à-vis societal forces.” 3 Joel Migdal, for example, writes that “a prime motivation for state leaders to attempt to stretch the state's rule-making domain within its formal boundaries, even with all the risks that has entailed, has been to build sufficient clout to survive the dangers posed by those outside its boundaries, from the world of states”; Migdal, , Strong Societies and WeaK States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 21.Google Scholar