Peer-reviewed article · 2022
Deadly Populism: How Local Political Outsiders Drive Duterte's War on Drugs in the Philippines
Nico Ravanilla, Renard Sexton, and Dotan Haim · Journal of Politics 84(2): 1035-1056
Winner, 2019 APSA Southeast Asian Politics Group Best Paper Award (Open Category)
In brief
Who actually carried out Duterte's war on drugs? Mayors shut out of patronage networks ran it most aggressively, with 60% more extrajudicial killings in outsider-led municipalities.
Abstract
Around the world, populists have won elections on the strength of crowd-pleasing, but norm-defying, policy proposals. Although effective at mobilizing support at election time, these policies are often difficult to implement in practice because populists lack allies throughout the political system. Examining President Rodrigo Duterte's brutal War on Drugs in the Philippines, we find that mayors excluded from existing establishment patronage networks filled this critical implementation gap. Employing regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approaches, we demonstrate that outsider mayors received 40% lower public works appropriations and, in turn, executed Duterte's drug war much more aggressively. Outsider-led municipalities had 40% more antidrug incidents and 60% more extrajudicial killings by police. The results illustrate an important trade-off between patronage politics and corruption (politics as usual) and violent democratic backsliding.
Research annotationQuestion, variables, design, findings, and mechanism at a glance▾
- Research question
- Who implements a populist leader's norm-defying policy when that leader lacks allies throughout the state?
- Independent variable (X)
- A mayor's insider or outsider status after the 2016 municipal elections, measured by party label. Insiders won on the Liberal Party slate, the legacy patronage network that controlled the distribution of national funds; outsiders ran as independents or under minor labels and so lacked access to a network with preferential access to pork. Outsider status does not mean alignment with Duterte: only 19 of roughly 1,600 mayoral races were won under his party label.
- Dependent variable (Y)
- Drug-related police blotter reports per 1,000 registered voters, an indicator of whether police killed a drug suspect in the municipality, and public works procurement in millions of pesos per 1,000 population. Non-drug crime categories and vigilante killings serve as placebo outcomes.
- Identification strategy
- Municipality-level analysis of the 189 Philippine cities and municipalities where an insider and an outsider were the top two finishers in the 2016 mayoral election with a margin under five percentage points. Two estimators run in parallel. The first is a two-period difference-in-differences by OLS, splitting pre and post at July 1, 2016, the day Duterte and the new mayors were sworn in, with municipality and period fixed effects and errors clustered by municipality. The second is a non-parametric regression discontinuity at the zero threshold of the outsider's vote margin, estimated as a bias-corrected local linear polynomial within the optimal bandwidth, with the outcome first-differenced across the Duterte transition. The difference-in-differences is also run on non-competitive races as a placebo, which the discontinuity design cannot do.
- Main findings
- In close races, municipalities that elected an outsider mayor recorded about 40 percent more drug-related police blotter reports after July 2016, an effect of 0.36 per 1,000 adults under difference-in-differences and 0.46 under the discontinuity, against an insider mean of 0.95. The probability that police killed a drug suspect rose by 16 percentage points, a more than 60 percent increase on an insider mean of 0.25, and by 23 points under the discontinuity. Insider mayors secured about 7.7 million pesos per 1,000 population in public works, 40 percent more than the 5.5 million in outsider-led municipalities, with the gap concentrated in roads and flood abatement and absent for schools and health facilities. There is no difference in assault, theft, homicide, robbery, rape, car theft, accidents, or total crime, and none in vigilante killings, and the effects are absent in non-competitive races. Outsider mayors then ran about 5 percentage points ahead of former insiders in the 2019 midterms, reversing a 17 point insider advantage in the previous cycle.
- Mechanism
- Shut out of the patronage rents that reward establishment politicians, outsiders substitute aggressive compliance with the president's signature policy as their route to favor and resources.
- Why it matters
- Explains how populists overcome the implementation gap their outsider status creates, and identifies a trade-off between ordinary patronage corruption and violent democratic backsliding.
- Speaks to
- populism and democratic backslidingpatronage and clientelismstate violence and policingPhilippine politics
Cite
@article{ravanilla2022populism,
title = {Deadly Populism: How Local Political Outsiders Drive Duterte's War on Drugs in the Philippines},
author = {Nico Ravanilla and Renard Sexton and Dotan Haim},
journal = {Journal of Politics},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1086/715257},
}