How Local Religious Institutions Influence Police Violence Against Civilians

• In Event: The Comparative Politics of the Police

Abstract

Populists who demonize outgroups while eroding the rule of law heighten the risk of state violence. This is particularly apparent in the Philippines, where since 2016 official police operations and vigilantes have killed tens of thousands of citizens in a “War on Drugs.” Under these conditions, how can the vulnerable find protection? We argue that actors combining local organizational capacity to intervene with a moral commitment to human rights, best represented in the Philippines by the Roman Catholic Church, can deter agents of state violence. Extant research has linked religious congregations to localized dynamics of political violence, but paid less attention how religious intervention influences agents of state violence. To do so we craft a set of survey experiments with an original sample of Filipino police officers. A map-based experiment randomizes the location of a Catholic Church in a hypothetical neighborhood to identify the downstream effects on police perceptions of criminality and operational planning. A messenger experiment explores the role of religious elites in raising the moral salience of the Drug War, while a conjoint design evaluating hypothetical congregation profiles specifies the particular characteristics of congregations that make them impactful on police attitudes. Our findings take on added weight during a period of heightened populist mobilization and increasingly militarized policing globally.

Authors

• David T. Buckley, University of Louisville

• Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison