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
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