Every six years, the Philippines seems to reinvent itself. One administration may prosecute officials that the next administration protects, or a president elevates an international arbitration victory as the centerpiece of their foreign policy, then the next sets it aside.
Government priorities change so dramatically that every election feels less like choosing a government than replacing one entirely. This is strange. In a constitutional democracy, elections are expected to change policies, not how institutions function. Courts are supposed to continue checking those in power regardless of who wins. Political parties are supposed to retain coherent identities beyond a single administration. Bureaucracies are supposed to preserve continuity long after presidents leave office.
But in the Philippines, continuity often appears to depend on whoever holds political power rather than on the institutions themselves.
The bad emperor problem
China’s Tang dynasty is characterized today as the golden age of Chinese civilization: 289 years of classical Chinese poetry, painting, and major technological advancements like woodblock printing. In the Chinese context, that flourishing depended on who sat on the throne.
Emperor Taizong, in particular, is regarded as the greatest Tang Dynasty emperor, celebrated alongside Xuanzong and Wu Zetian for establishing a period of strong governance, military expansion, and legal reform. Taizong instituted stable bureaucratic administration, drastically reduced government spending, and streamlined the penal code. He did this by appointing officials by merit rather than birth, cutting down redundant bureaucratic offices at the capital, and reducing local administrative subdivisions. Decades later, Xuanzong’s Kaiyun era followed a similar mechanism as officials were rotated between the capital and rural posts to improve local administration and testing.
But this mechanism was not resilient. For 2000 years, Chinese governance had no independent judiciary, legislature, or checks on the emperor; authority was entirely held by him. Instead of the checks and balances we see today, a highly centralized and sophisticated bureaucracy, bounded by tradition and Confucian education, meant to orient rulers towards public interest.
This is the anchor of Francis Fukuyama’s “Bad Emperor Problem.” Fukuyama notes that while the unchecked and unrivaled power under someone capable and benevolent can produce a golden age like the Tang. But no political system can guarantee a stable and continuous supply of good leaders. Sooner or later, the same unchecked power will fall into the hands of someone who is bad.
And by the 870’s the Tang dynasty had. Famine and floods struck a peasantry already carrying most of the tax burden, while wealthy landowners evaded it. External pressure and internal rebellion compounded the damage, but they compounded it — they didn’t cause it on their own. Three centuries of Tang governance came apart within a few decades.
The Philippine parallel
If we were to strictly follow Fukuyama’s framing of the Bad Emperor Problem, the only point in Philippine history where there could be such a problem would be the pre-colonial era.
The Philippines has never had anything similar to the dynastic systems that extended the entire landmass of the country, unlike China. But, before the Spanish conquistadors came to the Philippines, the unit of government was the barangay - a settlement of around 30 - 100 people. These settlements were independent from each other, governed by a “Datu” who gained their position by inheritance, physical prowess, or wealth. The Datus are similar to the Chinese emperors, as he was the executive, legislative, and judicial authority in the community, albeit not on the scale of Taizong. Moreover, instead of Confucian morals, barangays were more influenced by local animist traditions, trade with neighboring Southeast Asian polities, and some Hindu-Buddhist elements.
The barangay system was upended by the Spanish until in 1899, the Malolos Constitution formally separated government power into three distinct branches for the first Philippine Republic: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The Malolos Constitution was short-lived due to the war, but in 1935, the Commonwealth Constitution re-established the presidential system with three coequal branches under American guidance. This was also upended by the Marcos dictatorship when martial law was enacted in 1972, but in 1987, the current constitution restored the modern democratic three-branch system.
Now, the three branches of the Philippine government are coequal because they have separate, independent powers, and no single branch is legally superior or controlled by the others. Under the constitution, they operate as distinct entities that use a system of checks and balances to prevent any one branch from abusing its authority.
Looking at it plainly, you can deduce that by no means can there be a Bad Emperor Problem in the Philippines. Fukuyama specifically notes two things about the Chinese political system that facilitate this problem: A highly sophisticated centralized bureaucracy and a substitution of formal checks (rule of law and independent legal institutions) on power to a bureaucracy bound by rules and customs.
The Philippines has no centralized bureaucracy to speak of, not with three coequal branches of government designed to prevent power from pooling in one office. Nor does it rely on custom alone to restrain authority. Unlike imperial China, the Philippine Constitution distributes power across separate institutions and equips them with formal checks and balances. On paper, it is the opposite of the system Fukuyama describes.
Yet constitutional design and political reality are not always the same thing, not in the Philippines. I argue that the Philippines does not suffer from the Bad Emperor Problem because the Constitution concentrates power in the presidency. It suffers from it because the political incentives surrounding the Constitution gradually reconnect powers that were deliberately separated.
Patronage is the first mechanism. The Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), the discretionary lump-sum allocation given to legislators for local development projects, operated for decades until the Napoles scandal erupted in 2013. The scandal exposed billions of pesos that had allegedly been diverted through fictitious non-government organizations in exchange for kickbacks. Later that year, the Supreme Court unanimously declared the PDAF unconstitutional, describing it as an impermissible transfer of legislative authority over public funds.
The decision was widely viewed as a major victory against patronage politics. But the same incentive still exists today. Instead of receiving individualized lump-sum allocations, legislators now influence spending through budget insertions negotiated during the bicameral conference committee after both chambers have approved their respective appropriations bills. In the 2025 national budget alone, these insertions reportedly amounted to approximately ₱142.7 billion, much of it directed toward flood control projects. Separate Senate inquiries have suggested that over ₱1 trillion in climate-tagged public works appropriations since 2023 may have been vulnerable to misuse.
Political dynasties also reinforce this dependence. A study by Ronald Mendoza found that approximately three-quarters of district representatives, eighty-five percent of governors, and nearly two-thirds of mayors elected in 2013 belonged to political dynasties. Other estimates suggest that dynastic families exercise influence in almost every Philippine province.
The problem extends beyond electoral competition as many of the country’s largest political parties are themselves dominated by dynastic politicians, meaning that parties increasingly function as vehicles for established families rather than independent institutions capable of disciplining their members or constraining executive authority. Competition ends up happening between rival family networks seeking control of the same institutions - the Marcos-Duterte rivalry is the obvious current example - which means Congress, the courts, and other constitutional mechanisms become arenas for dynastic advantage.
Party switching, or balimbing, further weakens institutional independence from the party side. Political scientist Julio Teehankee documented one of the highest rates of legislative party switching recorded in comparative politics, with almost one-third of members of Congress changing party affiliation. The pattern became even more pronounced after Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016. PDP-Laban entered office holding only a handful of congressional seats but quickly expanded into one of the House’s largest blocs as politicians abandoned their previous parties to align themselves with the new administration. The Constitution discourages political turncoatism in principle, yet no effective statutory mechanism penalizes legislators for changing parties after elections. Consequently, electoral mandates become secondary to presidential influence. Rather than checking executive power, legislative coalitions often reorganize themselves around whoever occupies Malacañang.
Finally, selective enforcement demonstrates how constitutional accountability itself can become politically contingent. We saw this in the initial impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Duterte. The first Articles of Impeachment, transmitted by the House in February 2025, were eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds, specifically the constitutional prohibition against multiple impeachment complaints within a single year. After the constitutional bar expired, new complaints were filed, approved by the House, and transmitted to the Senate, leading to impeachment proceedings in 2026.
Now, whether those allegations ultimately succeed is less important than the institutional lesson they reveal. The Constitution provides impeachment as a legal mechanism for accountability; however, we’ve seen that its operation depends heavily upon shifting political coalitions, strategic timing, and the willingness of institutions to act.
These are just a few familiar problems that appear in the Philippine political system. But what we can see here is that the Constitution still separates powers on paper, but political incentives disrupt it. Congress becomes less independent through patronage, parties become less autonomous through turncoatism, political competition is increasingly concentrated within dynastic networks, and accountability becomes vulnerable to selective enforcement.
None of these formally abolishes the rule of law or constitutional government, of course. But they make those institutions progressively more dependent on the judgment and self-restraint of those who temporarily control them. This is far from the institution of imperial China, but it is still a system whose success depends less on the strength of its rules than on the quality of the leaders.
Coalition politics as an intervening variable
If patronage, dynasties, party switching, and selective enforcement explain why the constitutional branches become less independent, coalition politics explains how they begin acting together.
Coalitions are not unique to the Philippines, nor are they inherently undemocratic. Every presidential democracy requires a governing majority capable of passing legislation, approving appointments, and implementing policy. The danger here is when winning an election means not just controlling the executive, but the institutions designed by the Constitution to restrain it.
The Philippine constitution designates the three branches to answer different constitutional obligations. For example, Congress legislates and scrutinizes the executive, courts interpret the law, and executive departments implement policy. Their legitimacy then comes from exercising their own judgment rather than following the political interests of the administration.
But coalition politics changes those incentives. Because political parties are weak, legislators frequently change affiliation after every presidential election, and appointments throughout government remain concentrated in the hands of the executive, electoral victory often produces something larger than a new administration. It produces a governing coalition that extends across Congress, cabinet departments, political parties, and much of the bureaucracy.
This is what political scientists describe as agency capture. The term is commonly used to describe regulators who coddle and favor the industries they oversee.
In the Philippine political context, the capture is broader: Institutions are not necessarily captured by private interests alone, but they can also become captured by political coalitions. Their formal powers remain intact, but the purposes behind the decisions they make increasingly shift toward preserving their own alliances, protecting coalition partners, and weakening political rivals. Nothing disappears from the original architecture in the constitution. The Congress still convenes, and the courts continue to issue decisions. But these institutions act as part of one or two rivaling coalitions.
For Imperial China, concentrated authority was openly exercised. The emperor stood above every institution because no competing constitutional authority existed. The Philippines, rather than abolishing independent institutions, the existing politics gradually aligns them behind whoever commands the governing coalition.
An important note here is that in this context, the governing coalition does not necessarily have to be behind the elected president or be an inherently bad actor. The same structure and incentives exist beyond the executive branch, either good or bad as characterized by Fukuyama’s dilemma. But the consequence is the same. The quality and performance of the government become dependent on the people exercising power rather than the institutions constraining them.
Again, a president committed to restraint may govern responsibly despite possessing these political advantages. A president willing to exploit them may find that many of the constitutional safeguards intended to limit executive authority have already been weakened by the incentives of coalition politics. In both cases, the system depends less on the resilience of its institutions than on the character of those who temporarily control them.
That is the modern Philippine version of the Bad Emperor Problem. The emperor has disappeared. The dependence on the emperor has not.
Why a good president is not enough
If the Philippines has recreated the Bad Emperor Problem, then it follows that the solution cannot simply be to elect a better emperor.
Every election produces the familiar hope that the next president will govern differently - this was the exact hope during the electoral race between then Vice President Leni Robredo and Bong Bong Marcos. We can’t blame the people for having such hope since some administrations are undeniably more competent than others. Some pursue reforms with greater seriousness, appoint more qualified officials, or exhibit greater respect for constitutional norms.
Leadership matters. Good presidents can improve governance, just as poor presidents can drive the country to a wall. But that is precisely Fukuyama’s point. No political system should depend upon the continuous election of exceptionally capable, ethical, or restrained leaders. If institutions only function when occupied by unusually good people, then the institutions themselves are not doing enough of the work.
The Philippine Constitution does anticipate this problem. It fragmented power across three branches, established independent constitutional commissions, protected judicial independence, and embedded mechanisms of accountability ranging from legislative oversight to impeachment. Its writers understood that presidents, like all public officials, can eventually disappoint.
The difficulty is that constitutional design cannot, by itself, overcome political incentives. This explains why reform in the Philippines has often been cyclical. A reform-minded administration can strengthen transparency, improve bureaucratic performance, prosecute corruption, or appoint credible public officials. Yet unless the incentives that produced institutional dependence are also changed, many of those gains remain vulnerable to reversal by the next administration.
The implication is not that leadership is unimportant. On the contrary, leadership matters enormously. But leadership should complement strong institutions, not compensate for weak ones.
The Philippines has spent much of its democratic history searching for better presidents. It may need to spend far more effort building institutions that require less from them.
This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.
About Matthew Parra
Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.
