Mapping Contentious Collective Emotions in a Populist Democracy: Duterte's Push for Philippine Federalism

Abstract

This article analyzes collective emotions toward political change in a populist democracy. Taking the federalization of the Philippines led by President Rodrigo Duterte as an exemplar case, we extend prevailing scholarship which focuses on populist leaders' electoral discourse by examining the affective landscape of the populist public in a postelectoral context. Utilizing a sequential mixed‐methods design, we algorithmically classify the stance and sentiment valence of 18,535 Facebook comments about federalism, then we reflexively identify collective emotions based on major discursive storylines across each stance‐sentiment intersection. Our integrated analysis reveals collective feelings of (1) hope and euphoria and (2) vindictive contempt among supporters of Duterte's federalism, while detractors of the campaign express (3) derisive amusement and (4) fear and skepticism. Two of these public emotions may be idiosyncratic to Global South populisms: public fear and president‐invested salvific hope. We discuss the implications of our findings along themes of emotional polarization in a populist democracy, linking political affect with democratic participation through social media.

Characterizing network dynamics of online hate communities around the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Furthermore, politically directed hate likewise played a central role, particularly in the Philippine conversation. Here, public health concerns were compounded with additional political challenges of a polarized society and fragmented government response to the pandemic (Montiel and Uyheng 2020 ; Uyheng and Montiel 2020b ). Hate, in this case, does not ‘strike down’ toward any racial minority, but ‘strikes up’ at political leaders deemed ineffective at addressing the public health crisis (Lasco 2020 ; Uyheng and Montiel 2020a ).…”

Populist polarization in postcolonial Philippines: Sociolinguistic rifts in online drug war discourse

“…Our corpus was sourced from six popular Facebook pages with politically oriented topics and high levels of social media engagement. This social media dataset drew from a larger project studying public discourse under the Duterte regime; prior work used a different subset of this corpus and describes it in depth (Montiel & Uyheng, 2020).…”

“…Further in line with the idiographic functions of a discourse‐historical approach, we then searched for the top 500 Facebook comments containing the most central words in each cluster (Montiel et al., 2019; Montiel & Uyheng, 2020). On this smaller subset, we examined how these seed words were used in their original context in relation to our conceptual interest in populist polarization.…”

“…We investigate these propositions by turning to the Philippines under the populist rule of President Rodrigo Duterte (Curato, 2016; Ordoñez & Borja, 2018). Through a novel mixed methods research design (Montiel & Uyheng, 2020; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009), we analyze polarized online constructions of the regime's controversial war on drugs. We specifically ask: What polarized meanings of Duterte's drug war are discursively produced in English and Filipino?…”

“…In studying online populist publics, we join the burgeoning social psychological literature that leverages the digital sphere's extensive public participation to examine large‐scale politico‐psychological phenomena (e.g., Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Kende, Ujhelyi, Joinson, & Greitemeyer, 2015; Montiel & Uyheng, 2020). Facebook, more specifically, has served as a crucial site for the study of polarized discourse in its “natural” setting.…”