Performance populism: crises and populist rhetoric in the Philippines

This paper examines how crises and public approval shape populist rhetoric in presidential communication in the Philippines, a democracy marked by frequent disasters and recurring populist leaders. Existing research often treats crises as short-term triggers of populist appeals but pays less attention to whether such rhetoric persists beyond moments of disruption. Drawing from text analysis of presidential speeches from 1987 to 2022 and autoregressive distributed lag models, the study finds that approval and disasters operate on distinct temporal horizons. Public approval has no immediate effect on populist rhetoric, but higher approval is associated with a higher long-run level of populist rhetoric, suggesting that sustained public support shapes its baseline. Conversely, disasters drive short episodic surges in populist rhetoric, primarily driven by the human toll of events, when controlling for presidential context. The findings demonstate that populist rhetoric is not merely a reactive crisis response but an enduring political strategy whose longer-term expression is shaped by public support.