Everyday politics in the Philippines usually arouse scant interest in the United States. This changed markedly, however, with the near contemporaneous 2016 elections first of Rodrigo Duterte as president of the Philippines and then of Donald Trump as president of the United States. The similarities between the two candidates were hard to mistake. Both were self-consciously anti-establishment, they regularly insulted their political opponents and consistently violated norms of political correctness, and they styled themselves as law-and-order politicians, promising vigorous and even violent crackdowns on criminal activity.
Yet when it comes to political polarization—in the sense of politics and society being rigidly divided into two blocs along a single master cleavage—the similarity ends. In the United States, polarization between Republicans and Democrats likely was significant in bringing about Trump’s electoral victory. Moreover, polarization in the United States has, if anything, increased since the 2016 election. In contrast, in the Philippines, where political parties are almost nonexistent, there was no evidence of polarization at the time of Duterte’s electoral victory. He emerged as the most popular of a diverse group of more or less independent presidential candidates. Since then, despite his government’s notoriously lethal campaign against drug dealers and users, mass polarization remains all but absent.
With estimates of those killed in police and vigilante operations between June 2016 and the end of 2018 running as high as 27,000, there has been vocal international and domestic opposition to Duterte’s war on drugs.1 Human rights activists, academics, journalists, and a few politicians have taken the government to task for its violent actions and Duterte’s tightening grip on power. Yet, despite these dissenting views, at the level of public opinion, Duterte is so popular that it is almost possible to speak of a unipolar political environment in the Philippines. Why is that the case?
Although there is some potential for polarization in the Philippines, the country lacks many of the conditions that have made polarization endemic elsewhere. Filipinos do disagree over some core values, including democracy and religion; the Philippines also has significant ethnolinguistic and regional diversity and one of the highest levels of inequality in the world.2
The absence of political polarization in the Philippines stems in part from the remarkable popularity of Duterte’s signature war on drugs.
Yet, unlike in highly polarized countries such as the United States, these ideological, religious, and socioeconomic cleavages do not overlap. Political rivalries continue to be based largely on personality and faction rather than on ideology or identity. Additionally, the absence of political polarization in the Philippines stems in part from the remarkable popularity of Duterte’s signature war on drugs. Support for this government campaign completely transcends other political and economic divisions and undergirds Duterte’s extraordinary personal popularity. Although his popularity is not immutable, there is little indication of a more stable form of polarization emerging in the near term.
BACKGROUND
Traditionally, the Philippines has been a patronage-based or clientelistic democracy, in which political power rests on the distribution of economic benefits to supporters. In the late 1990s, Alfred McCoy, one of the foremost experts on the Philippines, coined the expression “an anarchy of families” to describe a system in which a handful of fabulously wealthy clans use patronage networks to dominate politics and the state itself.3 Elections were contests between these oligarchic clans, with the victors distributing a share of the spoils to their dependents, mostly the rural and urban poor.
The rise of a middle class and the saturation of mass media have altered this pattern somewhat since McCoy’s writing, but a few wealthy clans continue to have a disproportionate presence in Philippine politics, especially at more local levels. Inequality is extremely high, and politics are largely the purview of the rich. In this patronage-based system, party brands and loyalties mean little. Indeed, following a presidential election, it is common for many members of Congress to switch to the side that won. Some of the country’s best-known presidents, including Ramon Magsaysay and Ferdinand Marcos, switched from one party to another to win elections.
Traditionally, the Philippines has been a patronage-based or clientelistic democracy, in which political power rests on the distribution of economic benefits to supporters.
This patronage-based system has largely shaped politics in the Philippines since its independence in 1946. It was reconfigured, but not fundamentally changed, during the Marcos presidency (1965–1986), which included a lengthy term of authoritarian rule—the Martial Law period—from 1972 to 1981. Under Marcos, the main political cleavage was over loyalty to the Marcos clan itself. As he took down some of the country’s old political families, new oligarchies were founded on the basis of his patronage. In the mid-1980s, opponents of Marcos, most notably identified with the Aquino clan—first Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Junior and then his widow, Corazon “Cory” Aquino—mobilized a population that had become increasingly disenchanted with the Marcos government’s economic mismanagement, corruption, and human rights abuses. When Marcos supposedly lost the rigged elections of 1986, his tenure was no longer viable, and he was removed from office in the so-called People Power Revolution of that same year.
Despite this upheaval and the return of democracy, the country’s political system kept its basic clientelistic structure. The new president, Cory Aquino (1986–1992), did little to fundamentally reform the oligarchic nature of Philippine politics. Even as corruption arguably declined at the very top, contemporary reports suggest that it continued to pervade lower levels of government, arguably, in fact, being “democratized” along with the political system itself.4 Perhaps reflective of the public’s widespread disaffection with the political status quo, the vote in the 1992 presidential election was shared across a crowded field of candidates. Fidel Ramos ultimately edged out his competitors with the lowest winning vote share in the Philippines’ electoral history.5 Although Ramos passed some significant liberalization measures during his presidency (1992–1998), severe structural inequalities remained.
The prospects for root-and-branch reform seemed greater with the election of the former actor and populist Joseph “Erap” Estrada (1998–2001) as president in 1998. In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the economic anxieties of the Philippines’ enormous poor population fueled dissatisfaction with the political status quo. Estrada’s base was overwhelmingly poor, and his government was the first to see politics in the Philippines take on a cleavage with strong socioeconomic characteristics. In early 2001, however, a series of corruption scandals and a botched impeachment attempt precipitated mass street demonstrations, known as People Power II, which ousted Estrada from office. Estrada was replaced in 2001 by his vice president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–2010), but her administration, too, was marked by continual allegations of corruption and the use of patronage to secure political power.
The election of Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III (2010–2016) in 2010 was a testament to the continued supremacy of family over political party in the Philippines. The son of former president Cory Aquino and of Marcos’s assassinated opponent, Ninoy Aquino, the younger Aquino came to office promising socioeconomic reform, his main campaign slogan being: “If there is no corruption, there will be no poverty.”6Although his administration oversaw an uptick in the Philippines’ already impressive economic growth rate from an average of around 5 percent under his predecessor to about 6 percent during his tenure, his approval ratings had declined by the end of his term in 2016, even if he was still the country’s most popular outgoing post-Marcos president.7
This is when Duterte burst onto the national political scene. He hails from a minor political clan, and his mother’s connections allowed him to secure an appointed position as vice mayor of Davao City in 1986. From this position, Duterte became mayor in 1988 when elections were reintroduced. In Davao, he was a controversial but popular mayor of one of the country’s most populous cities, a position he effectively held—even though he had to step down occasionally to circumvent term limits—until his 2016 presidential run. His administration gained both plaudits and notoriety for its tough stance on crime, with even minor infractions such as littering attracting stiff punishments.