Cognitive Polyphasia in a Global South Populist Democracy: Mapping Social Representations of Duterte’s Regime in the Philippines

Prevailing scholarship on populism focuses on explaining polarized patterns of support and opposition for populist regimes. This paper extends this conceptualization to account for the fragmented politics of Global South democracies. Invoking the concept of cognitive polyphasia, wemap the Filipino public’s social representations of Duterte’s populist regime in the Philippines. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, we uncover a representational field organized by the two dimensions of political alignment (support vs. opposition) and political frame (individual vs. system). Diversely embedded in this polyphasic field, supporters of the regime may construct Duterte’s individual leadership in terms of paternalistic patriotism, or the broader government as a morally-bankrupt yet progressive technocracy. Opposition to the regime may frame the president as an oppressive tyrant, or his administration as a historical continuation of entrenched state violence. Our findings contribute to extant populism debates by describing unique representational processes of differentiation and annexation in unequal populist publics. We reflect on implications for democratic engagement in the Philippines and the broader Global South.

In both supply and demand accounts, prior populism research elucidates meaningful processes explaining the emergence of populist leaders and their widespread public support. As Stavrakakis and Katsambekis (2019) note, however, scant work examines opposition to populist leadership. Some research considers philosophical foundations for anti-populist attitudes, such as technocracy and liberalism (Bickerton & Accetti, 2017). Others explore how opposition parties and media organizations undermine populists' totalizing rhetoric and redirect populist narratives of blame back to 'irresponsible' leaders who make 'false promises' to the people. (Heinze, 2018;Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2019). However, while these studies examine macro-level resistance to populist regimes, we note that the micro-level demand-side dynamics of the populist public themselves remain relatively unexplored.
This paper attempts to address this research gap. We specifically propose that not only is opposition to populist leaders under-theorized; we also problematize the support-opposition axis which cuts across prevailing inquiries into populist publics. By highlighting the uniquely fragmented politics of Global South democracies, we aim to capture the contextual nuances which shape the meaning-making processes in which populist publics engage.

Fragmented Politics in the Global South: Populism in the Philippines
Democracies worldwide adhere to diverse models of political systems and practice, especially in contexts of inequality and stratification (Schulz, 2015;Scoones et al., 2018). In contrast to the advanced democracies of Western nations, democracies in the Global South are typically marked by institutional fragility, exacerbated economic disparity, and highly stratified cultures, which complicate the rise of populist leaders (Montiel et al., 2019). For instance, Hadiz and Robison (2017) show how the classed politics of Global South nations like Indonesia can be so pronounced that they lead to competing models of populism. Instead of a single populism revolting against a corrupt elite order, the 2014 presidential elections pitted the secular populism brandished by candidate most notably for his violent war on drugs (Curato, 2017;Nerona, 2017). Like many populist democracies worldwide, the Philippine political sphere is sharply polarized (Handlin, 2018;McCoy et al., 2018). However, the Philippine example also departs from the traditional populism model in significant ways. Duterte's ascent to power took place against the backdrop of ill-defined ideological divides (Teehankee & Thompson, 2016).
While amplifying the 'cult of personality' surrounding Duterte's populist appeal, such weak partisan politics displace the conservative-liberal polarities invoked in studies of Western populist democracies (Jetten, Ryan, & Mols, 2017;Tappin & McKay, 2019). Furthermore, Duterte's administration has paradoxically been credited with advancing progressive reforms related to fiscal reform, infrastructure, healthcare, and education, thereby receiving acclaim from pundits despite sustained criticism over extrajudicial killings and undemocratic strongman politics (Sta. Ana, 2019;Yu, 2017).
We posit that such complications lend fertile ground for examining meaning-making among the Filipino populist public that exceeds a binary of support and opposition. We contend that a Philippine case study exemplifies how the fragilities of Global South politics disrupt an uninhibited application of analytic categories in the populism literature (Epstein, Goff, Huo, & Wong, 2013;Sidel, 2005). Moreover, it signals the utility of a politico-psychological lens sensitive to the contextual complexities which nest the collective meaning-making engaged in by populist publics. We realize this framework using social representations theory.

From Polarization to Polyphasia: A Social Representations Approach
Social representations theory describes meaning-making in society in terms of socially shared knowledge (Jovchelovitch, 2008;Moscovici, 1988). In contrast to static, individualist views of cognition, social representations foreground the dynamic nature of knowledge as constructed by communities. Social representations thus consist of common understandings of social objects tied to group memberships, social interaction, and collective behavior.
As they propagate throughout society, different social representations may anchor across different groups (Howarth, 2001;Wagner et al., 1999). A society's 'knowledge' is thereby viewed not as consensual but as a 'representational field' featuring multiplicity and contestation, reflecting vital features of social structure such as hierarchy and inequality (Howarth, 2006;Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernandez, 2015).
Cognitive polyphasia embraces these general properties of social representations with emphasis on the co-existence of multiple, possibly contradictory forms of knowledge in a single society. Highlighting its constructivist orientation, Marková (2008) argues that cognitive polyphasia captures the state of everyday thought, which does not rely solely upon rationalist standards of logic, but on a variety of different 'thinking styles.' Society's need for a plurality of meanings has been linked to its continuous engagement with emergent and complex realities, a task which individuals and groups undertake from a broad range of social locations (Aikins, 2012;Friling, 2012). Polyphasic analysis thus unpacks the ways different representational practices construct social objects and links them to their associated communities (Jovchelovitch, 2002;Provencher, 2011;Raudsepp, 2017).
Cognitive polyphasia captures diverse social representations of the populist Duterte regime through a politicopsychological lens. We go beyond a traditional model of political polarization by integratively apprehending the broader representational processes with which the Filipino public make sense of populist democracy. Therefore, we ask: What are the social representations of Duterte's populist regime? How do they constitute a polyphasic representational field in relation to populist governance in the Philippines?

Method
Methodology in social representations theory is notably flexible and open to innovation (Lo Monaco, Piermattéo, Rateau, & Tavani, 2017;Wagner et al., 1999). This study employs mixed methods with a sequential design to analyze cognitive polyphasia in populist-led Philippines (Creswell, 2008). We apply a novel pipeline of quantitative and qualitative techniques to capture distinct conceptual features of social representations.
Our framework has two main steps: firstly, we map the latent space of the representational field using principal component analysis on quantitative survey responses; secondly, through interpretative readings of qualitative text responses, we analyze polyphasic meanings of the populist regime across the identified representational dimensions (Doise, Clémence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993). By integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis, we characterize polyphasic representations of Duterte's populist regime with both analytic breadth and depth.

Survey Design and Participant Recruitment
Methodologies examining diversity in subjective meaning-making employ sampling and testing procedures informed by different theoretical principles than mainstream quantitative research. Following the exploratory sampling principles outlined by Watts and Stenner (2005), our approach prioritized theoretically informed diversity over size and randomness, noting similar studies in this vein often satisfy sampling requirements with as few as 40-80 participants (e.g., Dziopa & Ahern, 2011). Primarily noting the diverse geographic distributions of local political support (Teehankee, 2018), we recruited a purposive sample of participants from each major region of the Philippines (N = 148). Demographic statistics are summarized in Table 1. were generated through a localization of key concepts in the populism scholarship (e.g., unconditional support for leader, rejection of previous government) and major political events related to the Duterte administration. Exact wordings were finalized through pilot studies with six cultural insiders. In the final survey, ten items expressed diverse statements of support and opposition for Duterte. Fifteen additional items represented subjective assessments related to five flagship policies of Duterte's legislative agenda. The final section of the survey asked participants to provide unstructured responses to open-ended questions in relation to his leadership, his policies, and his standing relative to the preceding administration.

Mapping the Polphasic Representational Field
To map the representational field of the Duterte regime, we conducted principal component analysis on closedended survey responses. Principal component analysis projected both item scores and participants into a shared low-dimensional space that maximized explained variance. We determined the final number of principal components based on additional variance explained, using 10% as a threshold of added variance.
This procedure accomplished two key tasks: firstly, it surfaced the latent structure of the survey items, revealing interrelationships between individual statements and overarching patterns of meaning-making which structured participant responses. Such dimensionality reduction methods align naturally with social representations theory, which conceive of representational fields as structured according to 'organizing principles ' (Doise et al., 1993) or 'themata' (Liu, 2004). We quantitatively analyzed individual item scores vis-à-vis their corresponding themata in describing the polyphasic representational field.
Secondly, we uncovered underlying communities among the participants utilizing their coordinates on the representational field. We systematically selected individuals belonging to each group for qualitative analysis of their responses to the open-ended survey questions (Robinson, 2014). Utilizing a 'theoretical' thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006), we reflexively engaged with participants' responses to capture shared patterns of meaningmaking informed by our application of social representations theory. We further adopted a 'latent' perspective to identifying themes, noting that our cultural insider status offered privileged access to underlying meanings participants invoked in representing the Duterte regime's policies and pronouncements.
We familiarized ourselves with the transcripts and generated initial codes by reading responses in the order of their scores on each dimension (i.e., high to low). Taking advantage of our mixed methods framework, these scores provided direction to our reading process, as they showed gradations in meaning-making as established by our latent dimensions. Conversely, participants' personal narratives and subjective reasoning contextualized their quantitative scores and enriched our understanding of the representational field more broadly (Montiel et al., 2019).
Finally, we generated labels for our themes based on distinct configurations of meaning cutting across participants' responses, following qualitative principles of 'internal homogeneity' and 'external heterogeneity' (Braun & Clarke, 2006) while also accounting for participants' quantified locations on the representational field. By synergistically combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we thus obtained a rich and critical characterization of cognitive polyphasia in representing the populist Duterte regime (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009;Yanchar, Gantt, & Clay, 2005

Results
Our integrated analysis surfaced a two-dimensional polyphasic representational field which captures yet complicates patterns of support and opposition for a populist democracy. Table 2 summarizes item scores along both dimensions while Figure 1 visualizes them on a representational field. In the sections that follow, we first present an overview of the quantitatively derived representational field and its organizing dimensions, namely: political alignment (support vs. opposition), and political frame (individual vs. system). We follow this up with specific social representations adopted by participants across different locations on the representational field, which we have divided into four quadrants in Figure

The Representational Field of the Duterte Regime
Because succeeding factors each contributed less than 10% of the total variance, only the first two principal components were retained in our analysis of the representational field. By triangulating item scores with participants' qualitative responses, we argue that the first axis of this latent space captures a given representation's political alignment in terms of support or opposition to the populist regime. On the other hand, the second axis expresses the political frame of a representation in its relative emphasis on Duterte's individual leadership versus broader government systems. In the results that follow, we present participants' and items' locations on the representational field in terms of these two dimensions (D1 and D2).

Political Alignment: Support vs. Opposition
Explaining 45.1% of the variance in the data, the first dimension corresponds to political alignment with or against Duterte's means seem harsh, but they are effective. He gets the job done, unlike the Aquino administration which ruined the country. (Alex,D1: +2.35, For me these are all necessary to make the country better. Duterte is just being a strict parent to the country and as any strict parent he is willing to reform and teach the people even though he will look bad. For me no administration is perfect. What matters to me is the outcome and the improvements made at the end of each administration. Although the Duterte administration may have its violent actions but I deem it necessary to reform and discipline the country. (Anna,D1: +2.54,D2: +0.02) Alex and Anna support Duterte's leadership by anchoring it in his ability to 'get the job done' and 'make the country better' in contrast to the 'Aquino administration which ruined the country.' Such meanings embody support for the populist leader with an appreciation for his strongman policies and a rejection of a previous elite government, echoing robust findings in the populism literature (Laclau, 2005;Moffitt, 2016). We note that Alex and Anna contextualize their support by acknowledging that some may see Duterte as 'harsh' and 'violent' which may 'look bad.' Anna suggests that these negative meanings belie a parental drive to 'reform and discipline the country,' thereby specifying meanings of populism in the context of a highly collectivist, family-oriented Philippine culture (Alampay & Jocson, 2011;Church & Katigbak, 2002). The second principal component captures 10.3% of the variance in the data, corresponding to the political frame of a given social representation. We invoke political frames in line with Goffman's (1974) seminal notion of 'schemata of interpretation' with which individuals and groups 'locate, perceive, identify, and label' social objects and events in the world. In the political sphere, relative focus on various features of a political phenomenon, such as a populist regime, have been observed to saliently shape the public's sentiments and actions toward it (Montiel & Shah, 2008;Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986).
In this case, complementary to the primary political alignment axis, the political frame axis distinguishes between representations focusing on Duterte's individual leadership versus his broader administration as a system. This secondary axis draws a salient distinction between items linked to complex economic policies about tax reform (TRAIN) and infrastructure development (Build, Build, Build [BBB]), in contrast to the rest of the items which discuss Duterte personally (both positively and negatively) and policies more closely linked to his electoral campaign and pronouncements (e.g., the Drug War). Thus, it appears that while meanings of the Duterte regime diverge primarily based on political alignment, such evaluations are grounded in likewise divergent representational frames visà-vis distinct features of the populist regime.
To unpack this distinction further, we note how Carlos and Carissa, who obtained negative scores on the second dimension (i.e., individual political frame), express their assessments of Duterte's leadership: Overall, I think he is more productive compared to Aquino, who had good intentions but was too corrupt.

Polyphasic Representations of the Duterte Regime
Whereas the foregoing analysis characterized broad themata of the representational field of the Duterte regime, we now deepen our analysis of the diverse social representations adopted among his supporters and detractors.
Each participant occupies a unique location on the representational field corresponding to distinct patterns of shared and unshared meanings of the Duterte regime. Invoking the four quadrants on our quantitative map, we qualitatively interpret participants' open-ended responses to examine the representational dynamics of cognitive polyphasia among the populist-led Filipino public.

'Tough for Our Own Good': Supporting Duterte as Paternalistic Patriot
Participants with positive scores on the first dimension and negative scores on the second correspond to Duterte Emma and Fidel locate their support for the Duterte regime in the president's person, constructing him as both patriot and father figure to the country. By invoking his 'nationalism,' 'care,' and 'willpower,' they construct Duterte as a heroic individual who must lead a country afflicted with numerous 'problems' and 'get the job done' despite resistance from the 'many' who are offended by his efforts. As argued earlier, such constructions resonate not only with narratives of support for populist leaders in general, but also with scripts of authoritarian parenting which pervade a collectivist, high power-distance culture like the Philippines (Alampay & Jocson, 2011;Hofstede, 2011). thereby sharply demarcating boundaries between populist supporters and detractors as in-group and out-group, respectively, of Duterte's family-cum-nation.

'The Philippines Benefit From His Corruption': Supporting a Morally-Bankrupt yet Progressive Technocracy
Other supporters of the Duterte regime focus on the substantive policies enacted by the administration. Participants Hence, while some minor recognition is accorded to the Duterte administration's putative political will, greater credit is given to the 'complexity' and 'rightness' of policy decisions in bringing about 'more jobs, more infrastructure'.
By prioritizing system-based representations of the political governance, some Filipinos may compartmentalize their view of the Duterte regime and thereby compartmentalize support for it as well, noting that they need not be 'pro all the economic stances of the administration.' Meaning-making along these lines thus does not buy into the conventional anti-liberal and anti-technocratic narrative of support drummed up by the populist leader from a supply-side perspective. Interestingly, such support does not seek to distance itself from the failings of liberal democracy, but rather sees its continued workings of 'incremental change' even in the context of populist regimes.
Such representations thus result in nuanced and ambivalent support that is granted with a streak of practical Machiavellianism. the country'), and violent ('he wanted them to die') oppressor of the people. Focusing on his uncouth 'cussing', defilement of 'human rights', and intolerance for the dissent of 'people he doesn't like', participants belonging to this third category represent Duterte's populist qualities as those of one emphatically unfit for political leadership in a democracy. Instead, they are emblematic of the sinister despotic tendencies ('a government where he can do anything that he wants') of a 'murderer', whose violent policies specifically aggravate the lives of 'the poor and oppressed'-thus reversing the populist's ostensible status as the people's champion. In this manner, supporters of the regime are correspondingly reframed as 'idiotic', whose 'nationalistic sentiments' have been severely misplaced.
Opposition to the Duterte regime is underpinned by a powerful moral rejection of Duterte's person and his unprecedented denigration of Philippine democracy. For some, this rejection sparks contrast with the preceding Aquino administration, against which the Duterte campaign had propped up their crusade for sweeping change. Because the prior government at least 'didn't blatantly encourage murder,' some detractors of the Duterte regime return nostalgically to it as a flawed but morally preferable alternative. Individualized focus on the populist leader thus paints political opposition to his regime in terms of extreme and exceptional villainy, condemning it wholesale and seeking a return to democratic politics as exemplified in the past. seek to go 'back to normal.' Interestingly, detractors adopting such representations share with populist supporters a condemnation of the corrupt elite which had dominated Philippine politics. However, to these detractors, Duterte does not represent the cure to the nation's political malady, only its culmination, anchoring the direct violence perpetrated under his leadership in the wider context of structural violence (Galtung & Höivik, 1971).
By foregrounding a system-focused representation of political governance, historical representations of the Duterte regime correspondingly propose an institutional response, one that breaks free from the 'continuous forgiveness' of personality politics in the Philippines which has perpetuated the chokehold of the 'rich and powerful' over the 'weak and poor' (Sidel, 2005). In the context of such representational practices, Filipinos who oppose the Duterte regime and see it as more than Duterte's individual leadership thus look ahead to the subsequent elections and imagine progressive possibilities ('uplift the last and the least in the nation') for the succeeding government.

Discussion
This paper utilized the concept of cognitive polyphasia to examine social representations of Duterte's populist regime in the Philippines. Integrating quantitative and qualitative methods, we mapped the organizing themata of the Filipino public's representational field and characterized the polyphasic meanings different groups may adopt across its dimensions. Our findings highlight novel contributions to extant debates in the populism literature, specifically in terms of attending to politico-psychological plurality with which citizens enact 'world-making assumptions' in the context of fragmented Global South democracies (Elcheroth et al., 2011;Schulz, 2015).
We discuss implications of our findings in terms of unique representational processes of differentiation and annex-

Representational Differentiation Across Political Alignments
Previous scholarship emphasized the dual processes of vertical and horizontal differentiation which underpin support for populist regimes in the West (Moffitt, 2016;Staerklé & Green, 2018). Our work empirically affirms that similar representational processes are deployed by some supporters of populist leader Duterte, both vertically against a corrupt elite and horizontally against drug addicts (Ordoñez & Borja, 2018;Teehankee & Thompson, 2016). While this analysis validates the dominant populist narrative in the Philippine setting, it also showcases the Global South departure from the prevailing anti-immigrant storyline in the US and Europe. Whereas among the latter, more advanced democracies, the designated social pariahs originate from outside the nation, the local drug war is directed inward, leveraging the institutional fragilities and inequalities embedded in a less developed, nascent democracy (McCoy, 2017).
Furthermore, our findings novelly demonstrate how opposition to the populist regime likewise perform practices of differentiation parallel to those of populist supporters. By adopting tyrannical meanings of the Duterte regime, the populist opposition vertically militates against an oppressive political order as personified by Duterte himself, while horizontally diminishing his admirers as misled at best and ignorant at worst. Much like populist supporters, then, the populist opposition may implicitly claim moral ascendancy as 'the authentic people' of the nation, albeit framed not in 'essentialized' terms which tie identity to territory or race, but in more 'civic' terms as rational citizens and principled advocates of democratic processes and institutions.
Diametric contestation between communities representing Duterte as either a patriot or a tyrant constitutes sharp polarization among the Filipino public in line with the prevailing scholarship on populist publics. Extending this view, we propose that underpinning such polemical representations are not only bifurcated meanings of Duterte's populist leadership, but also competing assertions of rightful citizenship as 'true' Filipinos.

Representational Annexation Across Political Frames
This paper introduces the new concept of representational annexation, as a complementary meaning-making process undertaken by populist publics. We define representational annexation as a process of linking, extending, or fusing meanings of social objects to complicate and specify their politico-psychological force. Besides extending the purview of representational differentiation across political alignments, we show how divergent political frames exceed and enrich a polarized view of populist support and opposition.
Our findings exemplify these processes especially among system-based representations of the regime. By em- Uyheng & Montiel 45 pervade any system of government. Whereas such disjunctures expose the susceptibility of governance to volatility in parts, they also recover its capacity to withstand absolute corruption (or absolute salvation) as a whole.
By contrast, communities which subscribe to historical representations annex the Duterte regime to long-standing state violence, invoking collective memories of corrupt, authoritarian regimes wracked with military repression and economic precarity. In this light, representational annexation enflames populist opposition by exposing the fragmented political system which enabled the rise of Duterte in the first place, thus seeking its reformation beyond the replacement of Duterte himself.
In both cases, what is at stake is no longer a contestation of who constitutes 'the authentic people,' but rather what constitutes 'the real government.' Are governments equal to their leaders? Or do they encompass larger vistas-and if so, which ones? As support and opposition pivot about system-based political frames, their corresponding communities likewise engage less in debates about collective identity and more about institutions.
Nonetheless, even as such representations appear to be less overtly personal, they remain sharply bifurcated, as technocratic representations appear to invite public trust in the resiliency of government systems, whereas historical representations highlight the more dramatic urgency of structural political change given its long-standing afflictions.

Implications for Unequal Democracies in the Global South
Such compounded fragmentations in the meaning-making processes we observe emphasize how fragile Global South politics elide direct application of dominant supply-side and demand-side populist scholarship. While some representational practices do run parallel to those documented in Western democracies, Global South democracies mobilize unique and unequal patterns of populist support and opposition. The public's relationship to populist regimes encompasses not only ideological divides, but also diverse politico-psychological attunements to raw personality politics, authoritarian paternalism, bureaucratic institutions, and histories of militarized state violence (Montiel & Boller, 2017;Schulz, 2015).
We anchor these divergent frames in the highly uneven social landscape constituting the stratified Philippine society. Local scholars have long documented the co-existence of bifurcated moral politics tied to classed inequalities (Hedman, 2006;Kusaka, 2017). In contrast to prior scholarship exploring the impacts of economic deprivation on populist identification (Alwin & Tufiş, 2016;Mols & Jetten, 2016), we show how both 'civic' and 'mass' political frames may become entangled with various political alignments toward the regime, variously resulting in euphoric, apathetic, or even radicalized communities of support and opposition. A polyphasic frame thus exposes crucial contours in societal meaning-making which embody the complexities of local political contexts.
As populism continues to sweep nations worldwide, we propose that such considerations are vital toward the process of democratization. As our work shows, political polarization in populist democracies is underpinned by complex processes of cognitive polyphasia. Such dynamics are exacerbated in the fragmented and stratified political contexts of Global South democracies. In the Philippines, as in many populist regimes worldwide, populist supporters appear to be unified by a clear leader and common sense of loyalty and patriotism. In contrast, citizens critical of the regime may excuse its moral ambiguities, or else diverge in terms of a crucial discordance between returning to a prior state of liberal governance and the more fundamental task of democratic reimagination (Blühdorn What forms of political change are possible in view of both polarization and polyphasia? Which shared and unshared meanings might enable or foreclose collective action among disparate, polyphasic communities? Our work does not claim to answer these questions, but rather emphasize their urgency by empirically mapping the plural and complex representational practices which drive them.

Limitations and Future Work
At this juncture, we note that several considerations may limit the conclusions to be drawn from our findings. While following established principles for sampling in semi-qualitative methodologies (Watts & Stenner, 2005), we note that statistical generalizability may remain a desirable objective for more quantitatively oriented inquiry into populist publics. In particular, although geographic diversity was emphasized in our sampling strategy, a glance at Table   1 indicates that our sample may be skewed toward younger, college-educated Filipinos, suggesting that more extensive stratification may also accompany a larger sample size for increased representativeness. In this view, the representational field we uncover thus serves as an informative snapshot of the diverse meaning-making practices adopted by the Filipino public, but it does not claim to encompass all possible social constructions of the Duterte regime.
Future work may thus considerably extend our findings toward further deepening populism scholarship through the lens of politico-psychological plurality. Utilizing our exploratory findings, more traditional survey-oriented methods may construct more statistically valid measures of diverse populist attitudes. On the other hand, from a conceptual standpoint, we note that cognitive polyphasia may also refer to the co-existence of multiple social representations not only among groups, but also within a single individual (Provencher, 2011). By treating individuals as points on the representational field, our analytic design forefronts a more macro exploration of polyphasia in politics. We affirm that such dialogic negotiation of multiple meanings of a populist regime may be fruitful to explore, possibly through a more in-depth qualitative approach.

Funding
The authors have no funding to report.