In February 1986, Filipinos gathered along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue to topple a dictatorship that had fused state power with crony capitalism. The promise of EDSA was simple yet profound: restore democracy, dismantle monopolies of power, and return sovereignty to the people. Forty years later, the more uncomfortable question must be asked: Did we dismantle crony rule only to institutionalize elite capture? Political scientists have long warned that transitions from authoritarianism do not automatically yield egalitarian democracies. Instead, they often produce “oligarchic democracies”—systems in which elections exist but power remains concentrated in entrenched families and economic elites (Winters 2011). In the Philippine case, the post-EDSA order restored electoral democracy but left the country’s deeply unequal social structure intact. From Crony Capitalism...