If you were to bin the Philippines’ political system and start from scratch, you would probably design something quite different from what exists now. One legacy of the country’s former status as a colony of the United States was an American-inspired political system grafted onto a society that had been shaped by centuries of quasi-feudalism under Spanish rule.

This incongruence of institutional design and socio-political reality has been one cause of the Philippines’ political challenges ever since its emergence as an independent democracy after the Second World War. A weak central state has played second fiddle in the lives of most citizens to local political machines controlled by wealthy clans who turned mayorships and congressional seats into personal fiefdoms.