One theory behind the anti-dynasty law is that it will force political families to diffuse and, in the wake of this diffusion, programmatic candidates will rise. The reasoning is that if entrenched family machines are legally restricted from monopolizing elective positions, the political field becomes more open to a wider pool of candidates who are not anchored primarily on personal or family name recognition. With increased competition, parties and candidates are pressured to differentiate themselves on ideas, platforms, and policy programs rather than on kinship networks or familial influence.

There are, however, two important points in this discussion. First, there is scarce empirical evidence showing that anti-political dynasty laws, in practice, strengthen programmatic political parties or improve overall governance, largely because such laws are not common elsewhere. What’s more, a study on political dynasties in the Philippines published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization by Labonne, Parsa, and Querubin found that term limits produced an effect whereby women’s participation increased as relatives of term-limited incumbents ran for office. This shows that the differential gender impact of such policies is driven by the adaptive strategies of dynasties to remain in power.

Second, and relatedly, our history is replete with evidence, as recent flood control scandals show, of the capacity of interest groups to organize around a single goal—in this case, maintaining electoral power. This suggests that the concentration of posts would simply shift from families to cronies and proxies, producing negligible effects on accountability or performance.

Restricting dynasties by blood alone does not alter the incentive structure that favors small, highly organized groups over large, diffuse constituencies. As mentioned, families dominate not because voters intrinsically prefer them, but because they solve coordination problems, enforce loyalty, and sustain long-term collective action. An anti-dynasty law, without complementary reforms that institutionalize parties and curtail opportunistic behavior, treats the symptom rather than the disease. Political influence will inevitably flow through another concentrated channel.

This is not to be mistaken as an endorsement of political families, lest we fall into the trap of the is-ought fallacy. But the answer lies beyond the convenient reinventions of political families seeking to outlive their latest crisis.

One approach is to replace our existing party system with programmatic, membership-based parties similar to those in Germany or the United States—parties that receive government funding and compete on coherent ideological platforms. In Germany, political parties receive public financing proportional to the votes they obtain and the private donations they raise, which helps institutionalize parties and reduce dependence on political clans. In the United States, while direct public funding is more limited, parties are highly institutionalized organizations with formal membership structures, transparent fundraising mechanisms, and strong partisan identities that shape candidate selection and voter alignment. Penalizing party-switching could further discourage opportunistic defections and so-called political butterflies.

The logic behind this is simple: if politicians are penalized for switching and parties receive public funding tied to performance, their careers become dependent on the strength and reputation of their party rather than their surname. This raises the cost of opportunism. If switching were punished (through loss of seat, loss of funding, or disqualification) politicians would be forced to invest in their party’s long-term credibility, because abandoning it would mean risking their own political survival. With public funding, parties would gain the financial capacity to recruit, train, and promote candidates based on competence and alignment with their platform.

Once this happens, the advantage of dynasties, and whatever counterparts replace them, will erode. Strong parties will solve the very coordination problem that families currently solve: they provide continuity, brand recognition, and organizational machinery across elections. The Varieties of Democracy Institute shows that countries with publicly funded, institutionalized parties consistently exhibit lower reliance on personalist and family-based politics. Voters in such systems rely on party labels as signals of expected governance, rather than surnames as proxies for trust.

The danger of the current fixation on an anti-dynasty bill is that it traps our intellectual and advocacy classes in a framework designed by the very people the law is meant to regulate. By fixating on a bloodline ban, the opposition may be trading away its leverage for deeper constitutional and economic reforms that could address the root causes of patronage and low competition in our markets. Unless we institutionalize parties and curtail opportunistic behavior, political influence will inevitably flow through other concentrated channels.

(Jam Magdaleno is head of Information and Communications at the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF) and an Asia freedom fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and King’s College London.)