Obeying in advance: Duterte’s election and the onset of the Philippine drug war

Jan Carlo Punongbayan
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Jan Carlo Punongbayan: School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman

No 202604, UP School of Economics Discussion Papers from University of the Philippines School of Economics

Abstract: I use event-level data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to estimate the impact of Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs†on political violence in the Philippines. Constructing a balanced panel of 80 provinces observed weekly from January 2016 through June 2017, I estimate event-study and difference-in-differences models that compare drug-war-tagged fatalities against a within-country placebo—non-drug-war political violence (battles, explosions, and non-drug violence against civilians). The headline finding is that the placebo series exhibits no discontinuity around either the election or the inauguration, while drug-war fatalities show a sharp, immediate spike. The violence increase is there-fore specific to the drug war, rather than reflecting general conflict trends, ACLED source-coverage changes, or other simultaneous shocks. As a precondition for this comparison, I show that the relevant event date is the May 9 presidential election, not the June 30 inauguration. I discuss identification challenges including anticipation effects, the endogeneity of ACLED’s tagging, and the absence of cross-regional treatment variation.

Keywords: Philippines; war on drugs; event study; political violence; Duterte (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 K42 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2026-05
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Published as UPSE Discussion Paper No. 2026-04, May 2026

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