Understanding How the War on Drugs Emerged as the Prevailing Moral Order in the 2016 Philippine Presidential Election: A Positioning Analysis

Date of Award

12-1-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Social Psychology

First Advisor

Ma. Elizabeth J. Macapagal, PhD

Abstract

The study conceptualized state repression as a local moral order discursively produced by political leaders as candidates during election campaigns. Leveraging the theory on moral orders, we conceptualized democracy as a structural space and election campaigns as a discursive space where candidates negotiate initial positionings through conversational storylines, creating a shift in the local moral order. To illustrate these claims, we examined the case of the 2016 Philippine presidential election in which President Rodrigo Duterte gained a decisive victory widely credited to his campaign pledge to launch a War on Drugs. Qualitative discourse analysis was conducted, employing positioning theory as our analytical framework. We analyzed public utterances of the presidential candidates on the issue of illegal drugs. The utterances were sourced from 41 news and opinion articles published in two major local online news websites, covering 12 months before the elections. Utterances were classified according to their social force of legitimizing or delegitimizing state repression in the War on Drugs storyline. Results showed that state repression was legitimized using multiple, interlacing storylines culminating in a national security threat narrative. Delegitimizing storylines focused on countering state repression but lacked a robust counter moral order to address the drug issue. We drew theoretical and practical implications from these findings.

Keywords: State repression, local moral order, human rights, war on drugs, positioning theory

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