Philippine’s Most Admired

Angel Locsin is the nation’s most admired woman for the second year running

Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte has again topped the list as Philippine’s most admired man, for the third year in a row, according to YouGov’s annual study of which public figures people look up to.

The top three most admired men in this year’s list are all Filipino. In second is professional boxer and Senator of the Philippines Manny Pacquiao, who has moved up three spots from last year’s ranking. Newcomer Isko Moreno, newly elected mayor of Manila comes in third.

Entertainers dominate the top ten. Martial arts actor Jackie Chan comes in fourth, and Hollywood actors Keanu Reeves seventh, Leonardo Dicaprio in ninth and Tom Cruise in tenth.

The list is completed with Pope Francis in fifth, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates in sixth and former President of the United States Barack Obama in eighth.

Actress and model Angel Locsin is Philippine’s most admired woman for the second year running. Locsin is followed by newcomer to the list Miss Universe 2018, Catriona Gray in second, and singer Sarah Geronimo in third place.

Similar to the men’s top ten, entertainers feature heavily in the list. American singer Taylor Swift comes in fourth, Hollywood actresses Angelina Jolie and Emma Watson in fifth and seventh respectively, Filipina model Liza Soberano in sixth, talk show host Oprah Winfrey in ninth and popstar Jennifer Lopez in tenth. The top ten is completed with Queen Elizabeth II in eighth place.

Methodology

From January to March this year YouGov gathered open-ended nominations from panellists across 42 countries and territories, asking them simply: “Thinking about people alive in the world today, which [man or woman] do you most admire?” These nominations were then used to compile a list of the 20 men and 20 women who received the most nominations and were nominated in at least four countries. An additional 5-10 popular local figures were added to the lists for individual countries.

Because the first wave of fieldwork was carried out before the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, some figures associated with leading national efforts to counter the disease did not make it on to the national admiration lists. This is unlikely to affect the global results, as such figures are generally only well-known in their own country and a candidate needs to be nominated in at least four countries to stand a chance of making the global top twenty (which it is less likely still they would have reached).

In fieldwork conducted from May to September we used these lists to poll each of the 42 areas asking two questions: “who do you truly admire?”, where respondents could make multiple selections, and “who do you MOST admire?”, where they could only pick one. These two numbers were combined into a percentage share of admiration, displayed to the right of each name in the graphic above and table below, which shows the full results for every country including local celebrities and public figures:

By asking respondents two questions, we can understand both the breadth (i.e. global reach) and the intensity of a person's support.

Altogether, we polled in countries that constitute more than seven-tenths of the world's population. However, some parts of the world were better represented than others, so we weighted up the impact certain countries had on the final scores and weighted down others so the global scores more accurately reflect the breakdown of sentiment in the world overall.

All of the surveys were conducted online, and in many of the countries the internet penetration is low to the point where the sample can only be said to be representative to the online population. The countries and territories where this applies are China (including Hong Kong), Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines.