In Search of Credible Elections and Parties: The Philippine Paradox 59 1986---signifying the formal end of authoritarian rule in the country---elections have also failed to overcome significantly its old afflictions. In short, the overall integrity and legitimacy of electoral processes, including their latest incarnation in automation schemes, cannot be isolated from the broader processes of statebuilding and democratization in the country. When a situation as basic as the Hobbesian problem is not decisively resolved in many parts of the country, the proliferation of private armed groups deploying violence with impunity during elections becomes unsurprising. When significant segments of the population remain poor, uneducated, and disempowered, a culture of votebuying is bound to persist. When national institutions of governance such as the COMELEC continue to be embedded in debilitating networks of patronage that mock the rule of law, elections become transformed into grand schemes of subverting the peoples' choices. Elections are necessary features of modern, democratic systems but the structures, institutions, and practices that make these exercises truly free and fair have to be systematically constructed and consolidated. Who gets Elected? Political Families and the State An understanding of the politics and electoral exercises of the country demands a careful analysis of the resilience of powerful families who have consistently monopolized various national and local positions in the country.14 This is not surprising since the evolution of the political and economic system of the country revolved around a core of notables made up of the educated elite (ilustrados), landlords, and oligarchs historically empowered and legitimized by the system of elections institutionalized by the American colonial order. (Rivera 1994; Hutchcroft 2000; Cullinane 2003; Simbulan 2005). What needs to be understood more systematically is why such political clans have proven to be an enduring feature of the country's social structure and political system and the impact of this structure on state-building and democratization. A better understanding of the political and electoral dynamics of the country is gained by studying these powerful clans rather than, for instance, overly focusing on the country's largely unstable and weakly institutionalized party system. Unlike the political parties which are largely loose, unstable coalitions of elite families activated only during elections, powerful clans are enduring structures of economic and political power. Modernization theory assumes the breakdown of traditional and particularistic anchors of social coherence and loyalties such as the family, village, and tribe, and the growth of “nation-states” and democracy. However, in many developing societies, such exclusivist and particularistic social