Keep It in the Family

Panamanians on Sunday elected a new president with a familiar name.

Martín Torrijos, 40, is the son of General Omar Torrijos, who ruled as a populist dictator in the country from 1968 until 1971. His is not the only dynasty active in elections at the moment.

Indians have been going to the polls over the past month in elections in which around 40 candidates are from political families, and the leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, is the widow of one former prime minister, the daughter-in-law of another and granddaughter-in-law of yet another. In the Philippines, this month's elections have prompted a deluge of complaints about dynastic politics.

And let's not talk about the current US president, whose father also spent a term in the White House.

Dynasties are a fact of political life around the world. There is the good: Edward Kennedy, brother of Jack and Bobby, has at last settled into his role as elder statesman of American liberalism. There is the bad: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria seems to have reverted to the authoritarian type of his father, Hafez, in the face of entrenched resistance to reform. And there is the ugly: Kim Jong-il became the Communist world's first hereditary ruler when he succeeded his father, Kim il-Sung, as ruler of North Korea in 1994.

In the developing world, the existence of political dynasties might seem logical. In countries where wealth is limited, access to the political system is difficult for those without the time, money and connections to enter what is, in effect, a closed shop. Political families tend to have those three crucial resources.

But while it might be easy to stereotype dynastic politics as a consequence of a lack of political sophistication, the spread of supposed western values can speed, rather than slow, the concentration of power in the hands of the few. Take the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, where egalitarianism was a cornerstone principle of the Pashtun people, and rendered a political fact by the fragmented nature of property ownership, which prevented families stealing marches on each other.

But the Pakistani newspaper Dawn has reported that the growth of political parties in the NWFP, with its spin-off of political patronage though appointments to the bureaucracy and armed forces, has seen the growth of political dynasties even here, a process exacerbated by the financial power gained by those who control the region's lucrative heroin trade.

The US, where the concept of wealth as a political tool has arguably reached its apogee, has long embraced dynastic politics. There have been presidents - Adams père and fils back in the 19th century, the Roosevelt cousins in the last, and the Bushes - but patterns of family rule show more clearly in Congress. Stephen Hess, the author of the book America's Political Dynasties, wrote in a column back in 1978: "There have been some 700 families in which two or more members have served in Congress, and they account for 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women who have been elected to the federal legislature since 1774."

It is not simply a historical phenomenon, either. In the Congress that began sitting in 2000, 77 of the 535 elected representatives and senators were close relatives of other senators and representatives, or judges and ranking state officials, according to Kevin Phillips, the former Republican strategist and author of American Dynasty, an attack on the Bushes' dominance of US politics.

That is as nothing compared with the Philippines, where dynastic politics is so entrenched and so problematic that the country's constitution includes an injunction against them. But before dynasties can be prohibited, the Philippine Congress has to pass an enabling law, which it will not do.

The Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism found in 2001 that half the members of Congress had relatives who had held elected office. The reluctance of Congress to outlaw dynasties may or may not be related to that fact.

Ricardo Abad, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the Ateneo de Manila University, has compared the political clan to an octopus. "A governor runs to the end of his legal term, after which the wife or son runs to finish a term. Then the the old governor comes back, while the wife or son seeks another office, perhaps accompanied by a sibling who's running in another area. And so on until the family's tentacles are all over the place," he told the Philippine newspaper the Nation.

But is dynastic politics really such a bad thing? In India, a series of polls conducted throughout the current elections have each shown a clear majority of voters satisfied with the presence of political dynasties.

In Asia, in fact, dynasties have been at the forefront of movements for political reform - when they have allowed women to enter politics. The German Science Foundation is sponsoring a research project into dynasties and female political leadership in Asia, in which Dr Claudia Derichs and Professor Mark Thompson are looking at 14 women leaders from 10 countries.

They write of their subjects: "There is no doubt that the rise of female leaders is linked to their being members of prominent families: they are all the daughters, wives or widows of former government heads or leading oppositionists. These women share dynastic origins and 'inherited' political leadership. As a general phenomenon political dynasties are not unusual. What is less usual is women being the beneficiaries of the family's political inheritance. It is not just a 'shortage' of men that leads women to be selected as successors within the family, but also their ability to symbolise a non-partisan alternative to (corrupt) male leadership."

Of course, those female leaders often end up being just as tied up in patterns of patronage as their male counterparts. The Philippines' president, Gloria Arroyo - herself the daughter of a president - has been criticised during the current electoral campaign for promoting the political career of her son. Miguel Arroyo is not even a politician. Until announcing his candidacy, he was an actor.

Nevertheless, proponents of dynastic politics claim there are advantages to having generations of politicians in the family. They know the ropes, have the contacts and can settle into the job easily, getting to work without a long settling-in period. In short, they say, dynasties make for more effective legislators. Moreover, they say, the presence of a familiar name can provide easy brand recognition to draw voters into polling booths.

Critics respond that brand recognition is hardly a function of healthy democracy. Nor is it something the scions of dynasties have earned: they are simply fortunate to have some of the charisma and reputation of their famous forefathers rub off on them.

More worryingly, dynastic politics can turn public service into a commodity. Those who come from generations of politicians, it is argued, enter the family trade not to do good, but to uphold the family interests. Could the need to avenge Saddam Hussein's plan to assassinate the first President George Bush, Kevin Phillips has wondered, have been one of the motivating factors in the second President Bush's decision to invade Iraq?

And what of Britain? We have had our share of dynasties, Pitts, Churchills, Hoggs, Salisburys and Chamberlains leading the way. Even now, parliament has serving scions: Nicholas Soames - who would be a pale shadow of his grandfather, Winston Churchill, but for his size - serves as Tory defence spokesman; Hillary Benn, son of Tony, grandson of William Wedgwood Benn, has a cabinet seat as international development secretary.

But would either of those august figures seek to use their positions to avenge family grievances? Not even the wildest conspiracy theorists have suggested Hillary Benn's wholehearted embrace of New Labour is revenge upon those Old Labour activists who spurned his father's attempts to take the deputy leadership of the party in 1981.

More likely, perhaps, that Benn jr is following in the footsteps of another political son who rebelled against the father. Stanley Baldwin's son Oliver won a Labour seat while his father was Tory leader. Did young Oliver use his time constructively, drawing up reforming legislation? Or did he visit parliament to jeer at and mock his father from the other side of the house? The latter, naturally.

Panamanians hope their new president will take a more Bennite than Bushite stance as regards his political inheritance. "Dictatorships are a thing of the past and democracy has been synonymous with corruption," Luis Arias, 52, told the New York Times this week. "I voted for a man who cares about the needs of the people. I do not care about his father." Let's hope Martín Torrijos feels the same.