How has the politics of anti-corruption been practiced?
In the Philippines, the case of this study, corruption is quite prevalent with a public corruption perception index ranking 114th out of 180 countries (CPI, 2024). Therefore, anti-corruption politics has gained public support, and before and after democratization, democratic forces, including civil society forces, politicians, the business community, the church, and the part of the military, focused their efforts on fighting corruption.
Specifically, these forces contributed to the democratic revolution by pursuing the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986) for its illicit accumulation of funds, and after democratization, they denounced the corruption scandal of President Estrada (1998-2001) and forced him to resign (Arugay, 2004; Kusaka, 2017). On the other hand, the authoritarian Duterte administration (2016-2022) practiced a different anti-corruption politics, imprisoning politicians who opposed him on corruption charges and killing nearly 30,000 “drug crime suspects” whom he deemed “corrupt” without judicial process.
Why did anti-corruption politics move from a logic of criticism of the dictatorship to one that supported extrajudicial imprisonment and killing?
This study will clarify this transition by tracing the practice of anti-corruption politics by actors both inside and outside the political institutions before and after democratization. The hypothesis is that the politics of anti-corruption has been instrumentalized by the democratization movement’s deterioration over time.
