Violence and Impunity: Democratic Backsliding in the Philippines and the 2022 Elections

Abstract

As president from 2016 to 2022, Rodrigo Duterte captured the judiciary, dominated the legislature, attacked the media, and presided over a campaign of mass killing, leaving an estimated 30,000 alleged drug criminals dead. Despite wielding vast amounts of power, Duterte stepped down after the national elections on May 9, 2022 in a largely peaceful transfer of power to Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son and namesake of the former dictator deposed in 1986. Why did Duterte amass power without causing full democratic collapse into authoritarian rule? The Philippines experienced backsliding to competitive authoritarianism: while elections remain free and somewhat fair, other features of democracy like civil liberties and political freedoms have eroded badly because of mass violence. The Philippine case demonstrates the autocratizing e ect of an emerging form of political violence: a focused campaign of state terror that produces fear and electoral success. I present evidence from two cases—the national "war on drugs" and its local antecedent in Davao City—to explain how violence escalates, provokes accountability, evades culpability, and contributes to democratic backsliding without immediate collapse to authoritarianism. With the election of Marcos Jr., the impunity of the former incumbent is likely to become institutionalized, and democratic backsliding is unlikely to be reversed.

Pretending to Support? Duterte's Popularity and Democratic Backsliding in the Philippines

“…In studies that employed the face-to-face list experiment, scholars have observed degrees of SDB concerning Putin's support ranging between 10 percentage points (Frye et al 2017) and 44 percentage points (Kalinin 2015), depending on the time of the survey. Furthermore, in a preliminary study, Iglesias and Cheng (2022) conducted a face-to-face list experiment with residents of Metro Manila and its neighboring provinces in late 2021. They found that the magnitude of SDB concerning support for Duterte was about 40 percentage points.…”

The politics of fear and the suppression of Indigenous language activism in Asia: Prospects for the United Nations’ Decade of Indigenous Languages

“…So, although we have focused on China, India, and Indonesia in this article, we consider the dynamics that we have described to be broadly applicable to a variety of contexts across Asia (and elsewhere). For example, in the Philippines, statesponsored attacks on human rights activists, including killings, and suppression of civil society organizations drastically increased during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022), often through the practice of so-called "red-tagging" (maliciously labelling individuals and organizations as terrorists: Simangan 2018; Hapal et al 2022;Iglesias 2022). In Uzbekistan, transnational civil society has been heavily restricted since the government violently suppressed protests in the city of Andijan in 2005 (Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014;Cronin-Furman 2022).…”

Confronting the Philippines' war on drugs: A literature review

“…Penal populism is characteristic of corrupt governance that rejects liberal democracy (Iglesias, 2020;Pernia, 2019;Thompson, 2016;Untalan, 2016) in favour of brute force (M. Thompson, 2022a) and efficient justice (Gaspar, 2016). The securitization of drugs (Aculana et al, 2019;Apriellio, 2021;Utama, 2021) and the performance of crises (Lasco, 2020) through the manipulation of the media (Parmanand, 2023), coupled with attacks on institutions and mechanisms of accountability (Brooke et al, 2023), allow proponents of the WOD to justify punitive though ineffective policies and isolate critical voices (Iglesias, 2022;Johnson & Fernquest, 2018). 3 LAMCHEK and JOPSON By identifying the WOD with penal populism, scholarship suggests that the Philippines' WOD is part of a more global phenomenon eroding democracy, that is, the rise of populism, characterised by the appeal of 'anti-elite' demagogic leaders, an evocation of a crisis, and a coarsening political discourse (Moffitt, 2015;Moffitt & Tormey, 2014).…”

“…Penal populism is characteristic of corrupt governance that rejects liberal democracy (Iglesias, 2020; Pernia, 2019; Thompson, 2016; Untalan, 2016) in favour of brute force (M. Thompson, 2022a) and efficient justice (Gaspar, 2016). The securitization of drugs (Aculana et al., 2019; Apriellio, 2021; Utama, 2021) and the performance of crises (Lasco, 2020) through the manipulation of the media (Parmanand, 2023), coupled with attacks on institutions and mechanisms of accountability (Brooke et al., 2023), allow proponents of the WOD to justify punitive though ineffective policies and isolate critical voices (Iglesias, 2022; Johnson & Fernquest, 2018). 3…”