Religion & Populist Violence: Evidence from Killings in the Philippine Drug War

• In Event: Religion and Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

Populists’ willingness to transgress social norms and institutional protections to demonize stylized out-groups fuels their appeal to large swathes of the population. In some cases, this strategy extends beyond rhetoric and abets extensive state violence. This pattern is apparent in the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte has overseen a campaign against suspected drug dealers and users in which thousands have died in both official police operations and vigilante-style killings. A variety of new data sources allows us to test theories regarding the factors that shape the distribution of state violence under populist rule, from levels of political competition to patterns of religious fractionalization and local civil society strength. We blend several thousand geolocated killings documented by Filipino scholars, media and civil society organizations with local census data, precinct-level returns from recent elections, and spatial indicators of neighborhood-level state, religious, and civil society strength to identify the ecological correlates of extra-judicial killings during Duterte’s campaign. We then use case studies of the Catholic Church’s institutional role in neighborhoods across metro Manila to isolate the mechanism through which religious civil society can mitigate the effects of state violence.

Authors

• David T. Buckley, University of Louisville

• Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison

• Ronald Umali Mendoza, Ateneo School of Government