It’s my second year participating in the annual Philippine Political Science Association (PPSA) International Conference. Apart from the fact that it goes around the Philippines (held this year in Silliman University in Dumaguete City), I like going to this conference because I’m learning many new perspectives that enrich my own work as an economist.

On the first day, I particularly enjoyed a parallel session that centered on the concept of “authoritarian nostalgia”—roughly, people’s longing for the perceived order, strength, stability, or prosperity associated with authoritarian leaders and their legacies. This was the subject of my 2023 book, False Nostalgia, but in the PPSA conference political scientists took turns debating and interrogating the concept.

Dean Dulay, my former classmate at the UP School of Economics and now an assistant professor at the Singapore Management University, conducted survey experiments to try to disentangle two types of authoritarian nostalgia: “cognitive” and “affective.” The first is information-driven, suggesting that if people are shown information debunking myths and misconceptions they would tend to change their views. The second is driven by emotion or affect, which suggests that if people are told about the moral failings of authoritarian leaders they might also revise their priors.

Dean found that neither treatment worked, and that notions of authoritarian nostalgia were “unlikely to be dislodged by simple factual corrections or moral appeals.” I had already recognized this in False Nostalgia, where in the epilogue I wrote that, “Unfortunately, facts do not always work on people. A lot of research has shown that no matter how well-studied or carefully researched a statement is, often, it can be no match to people’s cognitive biases (notably confirmation bias or people’s tendency to ‘seek out or evaluate information in a way that fits with their existing thinking and preconceptions’) and the rising tide of disinformation (which comes in many forms and from many fronts).”

There’s still much to be understood about the psychological basis for authoritarian nostalgia, and more broadly the politics of memory. There was some discussion about whether the notion of authoritarian nostalgia is a “fad,” but I think it’s still very much alive, what with Trump and another prospective Duterte presidency in 2028.

‘Garapal’ corruption

Meanwhile, my friend Uriel Galace of Duke University presented a paper on corruption, and he showed using an experiment that people tend to respond to outrageous (garapal) levels of corruption. It’s not so much about the specific amounts involved: in fact, he showed empirical evidence of diminishing returns, so that after a certain threshold people don’t care about even larger amounts of corrupted funds (for instance, corrupting P300 million is not awfully worse than P200 million or P100 million). Rather, people are nudged to speak out or protest only when corruption becomes common knowledge and becomes garapal.

The study goes to the heart of why Filipinos tolerate petty corruption and even turn a blind eye to huge levels of corruption. I doubt, for instance, that were it not for the fact that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself pointed out the flood control corruption in his 2025 State of the Nation Address, Filipinos would have shown similar levels of outrage. As for the ongoing fact-finding about alleged acts of corruption of Vice President Sara Duterte, I doubt very much that the new facts (including bank transactions amounting to billions of pesos) will do much to move the needle of public sentiment in many parts of the country in the run-up to 2028.

Interestingly, the PPSA conference also had a lot of sessions and lectures that tackled Duterte’s enduring popularity and legacies (I suspect this will be a mainstay in future conferences, too).

I found extremely thought-provoking the keynote speech of Wataru Kusaka, who describes himself as an “ethnographer, interpretive political scientist, and anthropologist-wannabe studying the Philippines.” He’s a Japanese scholar who has spent a lot of time in the Philippines since his student days, living with families in urban poor settings. By immersing himself in Filipino culture and ways of life, he picked up Tagalog and Bisaya along the way (he’s a fluent speaker now). (Editor’s note: You can watch a previous Rappler Talk with Dr. Wataru Kusaka in this video below:

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I became an instant fan of Wataru when I read a couple of years ago his 2019 book, Moral Politics in the Philippines, where he tackled the growing rift between the middle class and the masses in the wake of the two EDSA revolutions.

In his PPSA talk this week, Wataru elaborated on his notion of “New-Age Filipinos,” who he said had “growing aspirations and accumulating frustrations.” If I got it right, he’s referring to the portion of the middle class that were previously poor but who now view the current poor as “pasaway” (stubborn or hard-headed) who need to be disciplined and even “eliminated.”

I think this class antagonism manifests itself in many ways, including the recent heated posts on social media about the middle class blaming the poor for their miseries (with members of the middle class bemoaning the fact that they’re endlessly taxed yet receive little to no aid from the government). (READ: [OPINION] Another crisis, ‘ayuda,’ and why it sucks to be in the middle)

In this context, the new middle class tends to latch onto “counter-elites” like Duterte and other leaders who promise to discipline the pasaway. This helps explain the enduring popularity of the drug war even among the vulnerable segments of society.

I also enjoyed a presentation by political science students from Iloilo. They cast Dutertismo as political brand equity: that is, repeated exposure to Duterte’s “brand” created strong voter associations around toughness, safety, authenticity, anti-elite anger, and nostalgia for order. These associations then generated loyalty even when Duterte’s performance as president was mixed or negative.

For my part, I presented a new paper that asked a question that’s almost too obvious to ask: Did Duterte cause the drug deaths? The question provides added context to the upcoming trial of Rodrigo Duterte at The Hague, even if the legal question of causality is a different matter altogether.

Drawing on event-level records of political violence in the Philippines, I find that drug-war killings began climbing roughly two weeks after the May 9, 2016 election—weeks before Duterte had any formal authority over the police. By the time he took the oath of office, the killing was already underway. After the inauguration, it exploded: daily fatalities ran nearly 40 times higher than the pre-election baseline.

To check whether this surge was just a coincidence (a general spike in violence, or a quirk of the data) I compared drug-war deaths to other political violence in the same country during the same months. The other categories stayed flat. The break belongs specifically to the war on drugs Duterte campaigned on. People started obeying the policy before there was a policy—related to what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance.”

My paper is just one of a handful of quantitative studies in the PPSA conference that touched on political economy. On the sidelines I bumped into July Teehankee of De La Salle University. He said he’s curious about quantitative studies such as mine. It’s a great instance of scholars from various fields learning from each other: political scientists can learn from economists and vice-versa.

This is precisely the kind of interdisciplinary mingling and learning that makes attending conferences like PPSA worth it. – Rappler.com

Dr. JC Punongbayan is an assistant professor at the UP School of Economics and the author of False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for economics. Follow him on Instagram (@jcpunongbayan).

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