J. Gacera | HOME

Abstract

Political analysts observe how bailiwicks—or more popularly known as balwartes in the Philippines—weaken over time, primarily because of a number of factors: vote shift towards the end of the campaign, a candidate’s weak local presence, social survey results, and media exposure. Studies have it that, at least in local politics, bailiwicks and party affiliations are weakly established and are often overridden by informal alliances. This research paper aims to reaffirm this observation through network science; that is, by creating a bipartite network structure using cities and politicians as nodes and an arbitrarily determined ratio as the edge weight. Specifically, this study aims to explore a new way to quantify the strength of political strongholds and use eigenvector and betweenness centrality measures to determine the most influential figures in an area of political jurisdiction for potential alliance formation.

Introduction

Literally speaking, a bailiwick refers to a geographical area over which someone has legal or political control. The term traces its roots from the combination of the Old English term bailiff, meaning a local officer with certain powers, and wic, meaning village. However, at least in the context of this research paper, bailiwick or what is more commonly known as balwarte in the Philippines, refers to an area of jurisdiction, where political clans can win the popular vote even in the absence of an aggressive and expensive election campaign. Hometowns, for instance, are perfect examples of bailiwicks. According to Prospero de Vera III from the of the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance, bailiwicks are supposed to consistently deliver votes for candidates even if they don’t spend a lot of time or aggressively campaign in that area, or even without aggressively buying votes.

However, a number of political analysts argue that the power and strength of bailiwicks are gradually fading away—and that is for several reasons. There appears to be an observable shift of votes as the campaign nears conclusion. It might as well be attributed to the weak presence of candidates in the localities where they thought they were strong. Social survey results and media exposure are also a factor of influence. In the 2010 national polls, for example, only 2 out of 10 presidential candidates won the popular votes in their respective strongholds. Former president Benigno Aquino III won in Tarlac while former senator Manny Villar won in Las Piñas. Aquino and Villar both represented their congressional districts for nearly a decade before they were elected as senators and later presidential aspirants. Similarly, only 2 out of 10 vice presidential candidates were not junked in their respective hometowns.

Methodology

The following steps were taken for this study:

1. Data Collection and Preprocessing
2. Data Wrangling
   • Conversion to nodes and edges
   • Creation of bipartite network
3. Network Analysis
   • Projected graphs
   • Communities
   • Centrality measures

If you wish to have a copy of the technical paper, data, or the full code used in this project, kindly contact us via e-mail or LinkedIn.