Lay out the memberships lawmakers reported across eight years and the timing matters more than a one-year ranking. Condo and gym memberships drifted up and down, but golf memberships fell from 26 lawmakers in 2018 to 7 in 2025. More importantly, the decline did not unfold evenly over eight years. Almost all of it happened in a single year, between 2019 and 2020.
Read the trend, not the ranking
Public officials’ asset disclosures are published in the official gazette each year. Alongside real estate, stocks, and cars sits a ‘memberships’ line, and by how they are labeled on the forms they fall into three branches: condo and resort, sports and gym, and golf club. Take any single year in isolation and it is just an ordinary ranking — condos most common, golf least. As of 2025 the order is condo and resort (18), sports and gym (13), golf club (7).
But the real story of this line item lies not in any one year’s ranking but in the slope across years. Memberships are not a large share of total disclosed assets. Precisely because the column is small, it can show changes in reporting behavior more sensitively than larger assets do. We re-tallied eight years of disclosures, from 2018 to 2025, by type — to see not ‘what is most common’ but ‘what changed, and how.’
The 2025 ranking by type
That is where the three branches stand in 2025. But unfold the same golf memberships across eight years and you see where this single line — ‘7’ — came from.
Golf alone fell sharply in one year
Year by year, lawmakers reporting golf memberships went 26 (2018) → 24 (2019) → 9 (2020) → 8 (2021) → 7 (2022) → 7 (2023) → 9 (2024) → 7 (2025). Through 2019 the figure barely moved. Then, between 2019 and 2020, it dropped from 24 to 9 in a single year — a loss of 15. Most of the eight-year decline is packed into that one step. After that it merely hovered between 7 and 9, never returning to the low twenties.
What does the inflection point point to?
A decline concentrated in one year is hard to explain with ‘tastes changing slowly’ alone. Overlay the timeline on external events, and the inflection appears after the Improper Solicitation and Graft Act took effect in September 2016 and settled in over the following years. For politicians, a pricey golf membership may have become an increasingly uncomfortable asset to keep on record. This, though, is a coincidence in timing, not proof of cause. The data tells us ‘when,’ not ‘why,’ and we cannot rule out that other rules, generational turnover, or the pandemic overlapped in the same window.
The confounders deserve separation. Golf memberships stayed in single digits after 2020, but the fall was not a clean straight line: in 2024 they briefly rose back to 9 before settling to 7 in 2025. Sports and gym memberships, conversely, dropped to 6 in 2022 and then rebounded to 13 by 2025. A tidy story of ‘all memberships fading’ does not fit the data. The one branch that fell and never returned is golf, and golf alone.
Why golf, of all things?
So why did golf alone fall? Because the nature of the category differs. Condo and resort (18) or sports and gym (13) memberships read as private, unremarkable assets, closer to family recreation and personal upkeep. The same membership, once entered on a form, carries a lighter interpretation. A golf membership, by contrast, is easily read as a symbol of entertaining and socializing. What declined was not ‘memberships’ in general, but the one category that draws an especially harsh gaze. That only one branch dropped so sharply within the same line item suggests the shift had less to do with golf as leisure than with golf as a public sign.
They didn’t quit golf — the way they report it changed
That said, there is no evidence anywhere that lawmakers gave up golf. A disclosure does not record whether anyone played; it records only ‘what was reported as an asset.’ What declined is not golf, but the kind of asset that leaves a trace on a disclosure form. What changed may be not ‘what one can own’ but ‘what one feels is acceptable to write down.’ A membership might have been cleared from one’s name, moved into a family member’s name or another form, or held differently from the start. Either way, the trend reflects not the substance of an asset but its ‘notation.’
That is what makes this small line item interesting. Why it matters— the value of asset disclosure does not lie in the big numbers alone. The smaller and easier to adjust the column, the more clearly it can show how a system changes not people’s behavior but their habits of record-keeping. The fall in golf memberships is less a record of lawmakers’ leisure changing than a record of how their sense of ‘what one can write down without flinching’ changed. Precisely because it is small, the line is easy to read.
Method & source · We tallied the membership line of public officials’ asset disclosures (official gazette) by type across the eight years 2018–2025. Membership categories are grouped as condo/resort, sports/gym, and golf club based on how they are labeled on the forms, so boundaries can blur when a facility type is ambiguous. The figures are the number of lawmakers who reported at least one of a given type (a lawmaker reporting several entries raises the count of items); disclosures are a year-end snapshot. The link between the inflection and the anti-graft law indicates a coincidence in timing, not proof of cause. The tally is by type and does not point to any specific lawmaker. Data tally · kookrator.