The Drug Menace as Contributor to the Duterte Electoral Victory

We construct the drug menace as a standard 2×2 collective action problem with two self-interested households A and B, each facing a strategy set (C, D) = (Cooperate, Don’t Cooperate). If the households cooperate, that is attain (C, C), they stop the drug menace; if not, which is the usual outcome of these games under laissez faire, non-cooperation rules instanced by the Nash equilibrium (D, D) and the drug menace overruns the community. We introduce a game transformation via a third party-intervention-by-statute (TPIS) mechanism: a third party promulgates and enforces a statute S which penalizes non-cooperation D, spells out the contribution c of households, the statutory penalty p for, and the likelihood f of being caught, playing D. For certain combinations of c, p and f, the intervention is efficient, that is, attains (C, C) as the Nash equilibrium of the transformed game. The likelihood of an efficient statute rises the lower is c and the higher the expected penalty pf, features associated with a strong and wise third party. The TPIS mechanism is a parable for the role of governments in general: to consolidate and galvanize the local forces to overcome collective action problems. The third party is normally identified with the government in the hands of persons who hold the mantle of government. When the mantle is contestable and the basis of contestability is electoral, there is a vent for good governance in the form of welfare-improving interventions. The perception of households matter in elections and aspirants with a perceived superior track record on or one that promises superiority at solving the most salient community problems will rise to the top of the voting preference. Whether the track record is real or constructed matters little as long as it is perceived by the voter as true. Duterte won the Philippine presidency for a variety of reasons but the most cogent and tailor-made for his persona was the narrative that he got rid of the drug problem by employing a death squad which carried out extrajudicial executions in Davao City. By showing himself capable of bypassing the widely despised corrupt due process was an electoral plus for many poor people. Duterte’s electoral victory was rooted in the narrative that drug menace was a collective action problem number one and that if there was a solution it was inexorably tied to Duterte’s real or imagined persona.