Violence and Autocratization in the Philippines under Duterte

• In Event: Democracy and Autocracy in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Innovations

Abstract

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte may have committed crimes against humanity in a systematic, wide-spread campaign of mass killing against civilians. The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor leading the investigation estimates that between 12,000 to 30,000 individuals have been killed in his government’s “war on drugs”. A sharp escalation of repressive violence often accompanies democratic collapse. Yet the relationship between state violence and democratic backsliding is not well understood. How does state violence affect autocratization? I argue that this campaign of mass violence is integral to the autocratization experienced in the Philippines under Duterte. Ostensibly aimed at crime and corruption, I consider the anti-crime campaign as a type of state terror in weak democracies or hybrid regimes. Such a tactic is compatible with autocratization due to constraints from institutionalizing authoritarian rule by outright use of force. Rather than overt political repression against state opponents, the tactic produces fear but confounds institutional backlash—for instance, to the extent that that the campaign enjoys popular support or that the violence adds a coercive element to concomitant attacks on institutions of horizontal accountability or electoral competition. The Philippine case offers insight into estimating the impact of state violence on autocratization without being aimed at electoral competitiveness or causing immediate democratic collapse. Empirically, the case demonstrates that using a violence indicator signifies an earlier onset and longer duration than recognized autocratization periods, that could have otherwise gone “undetected”. This raises the question of whether the existing emphasis on electoral democracy deterioration should be reconsidered, especially under conditions of illiberal rule but in which political competition remains robust. I compare how autocratization in the Philippines is measured or identified in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset 2022 Version 12 and the Democratic Erosion Events Dataset (DEED) 2020 Version 4 with violence event and fatalities data from my own original dataset (spanning 2001 to 2016 in four regions across the Philippines) and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) data on the “war on drugs” with country-wide coverage from 2016 to 2021. Episodes of Philippine democratic erosion in the DEED dataset include Duterte’s “war on drugs” as state conducted violence, but as a precursor of democratic erosion rather than an integral feature. With regard to the V-Dem data on the Philippines, based on an index combining liberal democratic and electoral qualities, autocratization occurs at least two years later than a sharp increase in physical violence ratings. The relative importance of the polyarchic dimensions of democracy vis-à-vis basic civil liberties like arbitrary killing and other personal integrity violations needs to be reconsidered.

Author

• Sol Iglesias, University of the Philippines