Painting the town red: examining the correlation between the number of insurgency instances and voter turnout at the provincial level in the Philippines
Date
2021-01-18
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Abstract
For democracies around the world, elections have been the most primary way the people of a nation get their voices heard and as such, voter turnout and what affects it has become one of the
most researched topics in election-related research. The Philippines is a country that typically
enjoys a high rate of voter turnout, and while the Philippines also has many of the previously researched factors that normally affect elections, such as income and education, the Philippines also has other factors that could potentially affect those rates. One of those factors is the persistent
Communist insurgency perpetrated by the CPP-NDF-NPA. The Philippine government has long considered combating this insurgency as a major policy due to its national spread and prolific nature. The focus of this paper is to determine if there is a correlation between insurgency and
voter turnout. We used a panel data regression analysis to test whether instances of insurgency-
related conflict affect the voter turnouts of a given election year, within the many provinces of the
Philippines, excluding the National Capital Region and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. We found out that instances of insurgency-related conflict does affect voter turnout positively, but are weak given the sporadic and drawn-out nature of the conflict. We also
found out that when the Filipino electorate votes in relation to insurgencies, they value casualties incurred more than they value the instances of insurgency themselves, showing lives lost carry more weight than mere events.