The party-list is not broken. It was hijacked

Half. That’s the share of party-list representatives in the 20th Congress who belong to active political clans — 32 out of 64, by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism’s (PCIJ) count. Nearly a third have ties to government contractors. These are not sheer happenstance but the system working exactly as it was redesigned to work after the Supreme Court, in Atong Paglaum v. COMELEC (2013), ruled that party-list groups no longer need to represent marginalized sectors. That single decision broke the party-list system. Thirteen years later, nobody has fixed it.

The numbers downstream are predictable. Dynasties now hold more than 65 percent of all public elective positions nationwide, according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS). Governors from political families account for 87 percent of the country’s 82 provinces, per PCIJ’s own mapping. The party-list was the one mechanism supposed to counterbalance all of that — 20 percent of House seats reserved for sectoral voices that couldn’t win in district elections. Instead it became extra seating. The Marcoses and Dutertes did not infiltrate the system. They moved in, set up furniture, and claimed to represent farmers.

What makes it worse is the contractor overlap. A party-list lawmaker who owns a construction firm and sits on the House appropriations committee is not an ethical lapse anymore but a business model. Elizadly Co-chairing appropriations while beneficially owning the top flood control contractor tells you everything about how the architecture works. Ombudsman Crispin Remulla himself admitted the obvious last October: everybody in Congress knows their colleagues are contractors, and nobody cares because nobody runs after them. The flood control scandal didn’t reveal a secret. It confirmed what was already an open arrangement — one the party-list route makes cheaper to access, since 250,000 votes is all you need.

The reform proposals now circulating — Sen. Risa Hontiveros’s Senate Bill No. 1656, the parallel Akbayan bill in the House, recommendations from the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) and the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE) — are all sensible. Track record requirements, contractor disqualification, pre-election donation disclosure, kinship bars. But most of them address symptoms. Political science professor Alicor Panao’s proposal to remove the three-seat cap and allow genuine proportional representation is structurally more serious, because it would give well-organized groups an incentive to consolidate rather than splinter into shell parties every cycle. Naturally, it’s also the proposal least likely to gain traction — because fragmentation is what incumbents want.

And here’s the thing that should bother us more than it does: the groups that actually work prove the system can function. Akbayan topped the party-list vote. The Makabayan bloc held its three seats. Mamamayang Liberal won on its first outing. They had no dynastic ties, no contractor links, just pure organizing. Their existence is not a consolation but an indictment that the capture of the party-list is a political choice, not an inevitability.

A Pulse Asia survey this month found that 83 percent of Filipinos either support or are open to an anti-dynasty law. The public appetite is there. What’s missing is the political will to pass legislation that actually changes incentive structures — not just adds paperwork for clans that have spent decades learning how to route around rules.

The party-list was built for fisherfolk, workers, and indigenous communities. Giving it back to them is not radical. It’s overdue.