Weak Parties, Strong Personalities: Persistence of Personalized Power in the Philippines

Abstract

This study examines why personality politics in the Philippines has persisted across regime types and appears to have intensified in the era of platform-mediated communication. It aims to integrate three often fragmented bodies of literature—populism, mediatization, and clientelism—into a unified theoretical framework that explains personalized power as the product of their interaction rather than the outcome of a single dominant explanation. Using a critical, integrative conceptual review that combines theoretical synthesis, illustrative analyses of the 2016 presidential campaign of Rodrigo Duterte and the 2022 presidential campaign of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and comparative regional analysis involving Indonesia, Thailand, and India, the paper proposes that populism supplies the rhetorical register, mediatization provides the infrastructure for continuous charismatic performance, and clientelism converts mediated affect into mobilized votes through dynastic networks, while weak party institutionalization removes a key structural constraint on this configuration. These propositions are grounded in literature synthesis and illustrative case interpretation rather than in original empirical testing. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this framework for reforms in party institutionalization, resource-allocation transparency, and campaign communication, while acknowledging that their feasibility requires further empirical and legal assessment. It also identifies priorities for future empirical research to test the proposed framework using original data.