Working paper · Prepared for EuroSEAS 2026
Not All Political Dynasties Are Equal: Organizational Configurations and Electoral Entrenchment
Nico Ravanilla
In brief
Philippine local elections have hollowed out since 1992: fewer candidates, wider victory margins, and more uncontested races. Close-election regression discontinuities across the universe of local elections show that only one dynastic configuration explains this entrenchment, namely families holding both the mayoralty and the district's House seat, who retain power 36 percentage points more often.
Abstract
Political dynasties can shape economic institutions, public policy, and the distribution of resources in ways that reinforce their political dominance. Yet although dynasties are, by definition, organizations spanning multiple elected offices, existing research has largely treated them as organizationally homogeneous. Using the universe of Philippine local elections from 1992 to 2025, I exploit close elections in regression discontinuity designs to estimate the causal electoral advantage of alternative dynastic configurations. Most configurations confer little or no electoral advantage. One transforms incumbency: families spanning both the mayoralty and the district's House seat retain power substantially more often and win subsequent elections by much larger margins. Dynastic entrenchment depends less on family lineage than on the organizational configurations through which political families span different levels of government.
Research annotationQuestion, variables, design, findings, and mechanism at a glance▾
- Research question
- Which organizational configurations of offices causally entrench a political dynasty, and does entrenchment rise with the number or seniority of offices a family holds?
- Independent variable (X)
- The incumbent family's configuration of simultaneously held elected offices: municipal council, provincial board, vice-mayor, vice-governor, governor, and the district's House seat.
- Dependent variable (Y)
- Whether the family retains the mayoralty at the next election and the margin by which it wins, with term-limited handovers to a relative coded as continued incumbency rather than exit.
- Identification strategy
- Two complementary close-election regression discontinuity designs on the universe of Philippine local elections from 1992 to 2025, roughly 628,000 candidacies across twelve synchronized cycles in about 1,600 municipalities. The first design uses close mayoral races, with the tied candidate's vote margin at t as the running variable, so families that narrowly win and narrowly lose the mayoralty are otherwise comparable. The second design reverses which half of the configuration is randomized: it conditions on an incumbent mayor and uses close races for the allied office to determine whether the family narrowly acquires that additional position, with the kin candidate's margin as the running variable (for multi-seat offices, the margin around the last seat) and standard errors clustered by allied-office race. Both use local linear regression with MSE-optimal bandwidths and robust bias-corrected inference following Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik (2014), with density and covariate balance diagnostics reported in the appendix.
- Main findings
- Entrenchment is a step function, not a gradient. Ties to municipal councils and provincial boards (-0.03, SE 0.04 on margin), vice-mayors and vice-governors (+0.08, SE 0.06), and even governors (+0.06, SE 0.09) produce no detectable advantage and are precisely estimated. Families holding both the mayoralty and the district's House seat retain the mayoralty 36 percentage points more often (SE 0.11) and win by margins 34 percentage points larger (SE 0.09), and the House premium differs significantly from every other configuration (pairwise Wald p = .005 to .03). The symmetric design reproduces the pattern on different close elections, different running variables, and a different complier population: narrowly gaining the district's House seat raises retention by 23 points and margins by 22 points, while narrowly gaining any other office does nothing. Descriptively, over the same period the effective number of mayoral candidates fell from 2.74 to 1.74, uncontested mayoralties rose from 1 to 18 percent, and the median victory margin in contested races nearly doubled from 12 to 22 percent.
- Mechanism
- The offices differ in what they control, and only one complements the mayoralty rather than duplicating it. The mayor is the municipality's chief executive and controls delivery and credit-claiming on the ground, but cannot raise discretionary funds locally. The district's House member holds no executive power yet sits astride the flow of discretionary national money through congressional allocations and district public works, so the pairing supplies exactly what the mayoralty lacks. Councils and boards legislate but execute nothing, and the governorship draws on the same formula-driven transfers as the municipality while carrying only general supervision over it. Nested electorates matter too: a mayor and the district's representative face largely the same voters, so relatives can swap offices under term limits without surrendering the machine, whereas the provincial electorate makes a governor-mayor swap a mismatch of scale. Part of the return arrives as deterrence, discouraging credible challengers from filing at all, which is consistent with the rising share of uncontested races.
- Why it matters
- Shifts the study of political dynasties from inheritance to organizational configuration: what a family's political advantage depends on is less its name or lineage than the specific combination of offices it simultaneously controls. It also explains how democratic competition can erode while formal institutions operate exactly as designed, since term limits successfully remove individuals but not organizations, so institutions that govern individuals need not produce organizational turnover.
- Speaks to
- political dynasties and elite persistenceclose elections and regression discontinuity designsdistributive politics and discretionary fundsdemocratic backsliding and electoral competitionPhilippine and Southeast Asian politics
Cite
@misc{ravanilla_dynasties,
title = {Not All Political Dynasties Are Equal: Organizational Configurations and Electoral Entrenchment},
author = {Nico Ravanilla},
howpublished = {Working paper},
}