Deadly Populism: How Local Political Outsiders Drive Duterte's War on Drugs in the Philippines

Around the world, populists have won elections on the strength of crowd-pleasing, but norm-defying, policy proposals. Although effective at mobilizing support at election time, these policies are often difficult to implement in practice because populists lack allies throughout the political system. Examining President Rodrigo Duterte's brutal War on Drugs in the Philippines, we find that mayors excluded from existing establishment patronage networks filled this critical implementation gap. Employing regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approaches, we demonstrate that outsider mayors received 40% lower public works appropriations and, in turn, executed Duterte's drug war much more aggressively. Outsider-led municipalities had 40% more antidrug incidents and 60% more extrajudicial killings by police. The results illustrate an important trade-off between patronage politics and corruption (politics as usual) and violent democratic backsliding.