Populist Appeal or Fearful Support? Examining the War on Drugs in the Philippines under Duterte

The “war on drugs” under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte killed thousands of Filipinos between 2016 and 2022, yet the campaign was famously popular. Was public approval of the national anti-crime campaign real? Some scholars argue that public support for the drug war and Duterte was evidence of penal populism. Yet other studies suggest that state-sponsored violence produced fear. While state violence can constrain public opinion, its effect in hybrid regimes remains underexplored. I hypothesize that survey respondents in locales that experienced higher levels of violence are more likely to voice false support for the president and his drug war. This study compares survey responses using both conventional direct questioning as well as the list experiment, an indirect survey method intended to reduce possible dishonesty. This approach measures social desirability bias (SDB), or the distortion of survey results over sensitive questions. This study shows that presidential popularity is inflated by about 40 percentage points. However, violence intensity does not explain preference falsification in respondents’ support for the president. Moreover, SDB in public approval of the anti-crime campaign (eight percentage points) was not statistically significant. Unexpectedly, respondents in areas that experienced high levels of violence were less likely to produce SDB for the drug war, although SDB is likely to be higher in urban areas. Popular support for the “war on drugs” is plausible: rather than being driven by fear, it generated widespread approval. The research findings discussed in this article provide mixed evidence for the penal populism thesis: presidential popularity is inflated, yet support for the drug war is genuine.