Personality Matters: How Mayors Navigated Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines

This working paper explores how mayors’ leader­ship traits and emotional responses influenced local political reactions to President Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines. It reveals that mayors with high belief in per­sonal control, need for power, and self-confidence were more likely to expe­rience anger, proactively engage with local police, and shape law enforce­ment practices. Con­versely, those with lower levels tended to expe­rience anxiety or fear, leading to risk-averse choices and disen­gagement from the police. The analysis is based on nearly 50 interviews with mayors, police chiefs, pro­secutors, and other officials across major cities in the Philippines. The fin­dings indicate that engage­ment with local police seemed to lower levels of deadly force use during the war on drugs, irres­pective of the mayor’s law enforce­ment ideology. Despite national directives gover­ning police actions, local leaders wielded considerable influence over law enforce­ment practices. This working paper contributes to under­standing how individual characte­ristics and emotional responses can alter political output and out­comes, advo­cating for a greater focus on personality in poli­tical science. By high­lighting the role of local political leader­ship, it underscores the importance of con­sidering the political environment in which police operate in research on police use of force.