Observing the observers [4]: Recent articles on Thai politics (2)

MHN

28 July 2025

This post emphasizes a level of the Thai political system that is often neglected when it comes to talking about power politics in Thailand, the sub-national or provincial level, though the elections of the Provincial Administrative Organizations’ executives (nayok PAO) earlier this year gained considerable attention, at least within Thailand. Moreover, as I write this, the by-election for an MP in Sisaket’s constituency 5 will take place on 10 August 2025. And who will be the candidates? Yes, the daughters of the previous main contenders, thereby emphasizing the role of informal personalistic political networks in provincial Thailand, especially the importance of dynastic political families.

The first article is by James Ockey. His text deals with the changing relationships (as of 2017) of national political parties and their local election candidates running to win in the constituency contests. This relationship has greatly gained in importance with the increasing politicization of the local voters. Ockey presents examples from Chiang Mai, Buriram, and Nong Khai. Though voter loyalty to political parties has increased, informal personalistic political networks remain fairly independent of political parties. Readers will notice that this article was written before the Future Forward Party (2019) and the Move Forward Party (2023) occurred on the provincial political scene.

Suthikarn Meechan deals with the election of 2019. She emphasizes the importance of informal personalistic political networks, often connected to political families, for motivating voters to cast their ballots for certain candidates and political parties. However, it remains an open question precisely how many votes are motivated by clientelistic considerations, and how many are motivated by other considerations. This was also the first elections in which the Future Forward Party took part. Since this party did not have established local networks, the FFP should have failed. Yet, the party received a considerable number of votes. How was this possible?

Viengrat Nethipo’s text is also about the local electoral situation in the national 2019 election. Like Suthikarn, she emphasizes the local forces that are at play when it comes to making people decide for whom they should vote. Thus, she also targets clientelistic relations in her analysis. Yet, from her perspective, this is a return to older forms of electioneering. Since the time of Thaksin Shinawatra, voters are said to have placed increasing emphasis on programmatic and policy issues. However, the coups of 2006 and 2014, according to Viengrat, have destructed this trend of political change, and thus provincial-level structures have returned to their previous local personalistic ways. One would have to add the electoral success of FFP and MFP to this assessment since they were supposed to rely on programmatic incentives.

To add a time perspective to the preceding three articles, I have added a summary of Viengrat’s earlier text of 2008. The article emphasizes the role of informal personalistic political networks. With decentralization, this role had, in fact, increased because these networks expanded their influence by capturing the newly available local government positions. It could have been pointed out that these informal networks operated as functional equivalents to political parties. Viengrat provides some interesting information about the situation of family-related politics in Ubon Ratchathani province.

To add some variety to the four articles on provincial-level political structures, I have added two articles by Pasul Phongpaichit and Chris Baker on Thaksin Shinawatra’s populism. They point out that, from his beginning in the election campaign leading to the 2001 elections, Thaksin was not a populist but rather a modernist reformer. Populist elements occurred first when he was in danger of being disqualified by the Constitutional Court. He is said to have become more populist between March 2004 and January 2006 in reaction to increasingly heavy attacks on his style of politics. For some groups, the monarchy was an obvious tool for providing a counterpoint of Thaksin’s political approach. When Pasuk/Baker state that 2006 saw a “rupture in Thailand’s democratic history,” this had become even more significant, and potentially longer lasting, a decade later. Thailand’s “old institutions, along with large sections of the intelligentsia and middle class, [continued] to fear [not only Thaksin’s populism, but also the politization of the rural masses and thus] electoral democracy itself.” It was the socio-economic deficiencies that existed before Thaksin appeared on the scene that turned him into a catalyst for a “mobilization of mass forces on a scale not previously seen in Thai politics.”

Ockey, James. 2017. “Team Work: Shifting Patterns and Relationships in Local and National Politics in Thailand.” Sojourn 32 (3):562-600.

Ockey observes that new patterns of relationships have developed between political parties and provincial politicians. They are based on “shared voter loyalties” and the “political patronage available at the local level” (p. 562). The issue of voter loyalty connects to an increased politicization of voters. Previously, voters used to be loyal to certain local candidates. Nowadays, both have become loyal to national political parties. Thus, the author’s key question is, “How have relationships among voters, parties and provincial politicians changed in contemporary Thailand?” (p. 563). However, this does not include a party-politicization of informal personalistic local political structures, though these structures benefit from the voters’ attachment to party brands. This is different from the previous situation in which influential local politicians relied on “their own network of personal supporters” (p. 565). This system had developed in the 1980s. “Political parties mainly consisted of coalitions of such provincial politicians” (ibid.). Thus, national “elections were won locally” (ibid.). And “voter loyalties were to politicians, not to parties” (p. 566).

This changed when the 1997 Constitution introduced the party-list ballot, which added a nationalized element to the previously localized national elections. At the same time, provincial MPs were practically excluded from joining the cabinet. Yet, important faction leaders could expand their influence by moving up to the party list and transferring their constituency seats to family members. At the same time, the concurrent implementation of the decentralization laws also created more electoral positions and increased the resources available to provincial networks via their involvement in local authorities. “It was in this arena that provincial politicians would regain lost patronage and power” (p. 569), without political parties trying to expand to capture this arena. In sum, “At the local level, parties have little formal involvement in politics. Local politics is organized around local and at least nominally independent teams—both the Thai word klum (group) and the English word ‘team’ are used to describe them” (p. 571). They are informally linked to political parties, most visibly through who becomes MPs in national elections. Occasionally, there can be conflicts when different local groups compete for having their leaders be nominated by a party as its MP election candidate, or as a candidate to important posts in local authorities. “Membership in local teams is informal, and members can change sides during their terms in office or even attempt to engage more than one side in their quest for political advantage” (p. 572).

In the following sections, Ockey describes the approaches of political parties vis-à-vis local political structures. Some special attention is paid to Chiang Mai’s Thasanai Buranupakorn and his “Khunatham” group (pp. 581-584). The Chidchob family in Buriram also gets a paragraph on p. 585. This is followed by a consideration of “entirely local teams” (ibid.), especially in Nongkhai province (p. 586f.). With respect to local political competition, Ockey notes, “Still these levels of dominance appear to indicate limited democratic competition in the provincial [PAO] assemblies and local councils in a majority of provinces and major municipalities” (p. 590). “Teams, vote canvassers, and strong roles for political families are the norm” (ibid.). He draws a comparison to Latin America and its “hybrid democracy,” meaning that “democracy at the national level [is combined] with authoritarian enclaves at the local level” (p. 591). However, “in other ways, local politics in Thailand holds out hope for the future of democracy” (ibid.). This view seems to be directed at the avoidance of “local-level excesses” (p. 292). Nevertheless, for example, the Phuea Thai Party still “supports MPs’ own offices, not party branches,” while financial support goes to areas where the party is strong already, rather than trying to increase competition where other groups dominate (p. 593). “Neither party [PT, DEM] has invested much at the grass-roots level in expansion into new areas…” (ibid.). Therefore, the stronghold patterns will persist. Regarding the PT, Ockey notes that the distinction between local groups and political party might become “less meaningful,” because “voters, provincial-politician members and national leaders increasingly work together to achieve a particular set of national political outcomes” (p. 594). This situation is the main reason “all attempts to eradicate Phuea Thai have failed. And yet those developing loyalties are also what makes the distance maintained between parties and local politics all the more fascinating” (ibid.).

Suthikarn Meechan. 2020. “Clientelistic Networks in the 2019 Thai General Election: Evidence From Roi-Et Province.” Social Science Asia 6 (4):1-20. (Journal of the National Research Council of Thailand, in conjunction with the Journal of Politics and Governance.)

Suthikarn’s article on the 2019 elections emphasizes “the power generated by local forces within the constituencies” (p. 1), meaning in comparison to the national forces that might be present via political parties. However, the latter enter the picture only as cooperation partners of the former. Voters are said to cast their ballots in national elections because they are mobilized by the candidate’s use of “clientelistic strategies” (ibid.). [MN: One wonders whether it is a realistic assumption that voters would stay at home in national elections when there was no such “electoral mobilization.” Do voters have no political interest in who represents them in parliament and who will form the government?] Those strategies include the use of vote canvassers [hua khanaen] as well as vote-buying. [MN: Do these means mobilize voters to participate in elections or do they influence some voters regarding whom they will vote for?] According to this approach, in terms of political structures, provinces are covered by “clientelistic networks” (ibid.). These, in turn, are “generally part of the families attached to political parties” (ibid.). These political families are said to form the core of these networks. [MN: One might add that this model seems to be closed, meaning that all votes that were cast in the 2019 elections, at least in the author’s case province, were produced as part of these structures. If a candidate lost in a constituency contest, it was because his/her mobilization network was smaller than that of the winner. There could be no self-mobilized votes, that is, votes that were cast without being mobilized by a network. Yet, the Future Forward Party received 90,063 votes provincewide, supposedly without using means of “electoral mobilization” or “clientelistic networks.” Moreover, four years later, the Move Forward Party increased this number to 128,031 votes, besides gaining 30.49 percent of the party-list vote. One wonders how this fits together with the author’s model.] On p. 8, Suthikarn states, “it can be said that the number of prominent candidates in each constituency is one of the factors that motivates people to exercise their voting rights.” But how can she know what motivated voters when they remain black boxes? On p. 9, the author seems to make what might appear as a bold claim: “patron-client ties have returned as the most fundamental type in Thai politics as branding is less important.” Does this mean that if a candidate, say, gets 50,000 votes, he or she will have patron-client ties with each of them, either directly or indirectly? And are voters in her case province in such precarious socio-economic situations that they need a patron for conducting their everyday lives? On p. 10 follows a figure regarding vote-canvassing networks comprising “brokers” at district, sub-district, and village levels. This is the quasi-traditional concept of vote-generating structures of which the candidates have several. They also operate the vote-buying system. Suthikarn provides some information on candidates running under the Phuea Thai, Phalang Pracharath, and Chart Thai Pattana party labels. No assessment is made about how the candidates of the Future Forward Party fit into her model. Without doubt, the winners in the author’s case province had well-organized vote-getting networks. Yet, one would have liked to know by which means the FFP got its votes when it did not employ clientelistic networks. An additional question could have been precisely how many of the winners’s votes were due to their “clientelistic networks” and how many of their votes were won by other considerations by the voters, and what considerations these were.

Viengrat Nethipo. 2019. “Clientelism Under the NCPO and the 2019 Elections: New Networks in Older Forms.” Paper presented at The AAS-in-Asia 2019 Conference at Royal Orchid Sheraton, Bangkok Thailand, 1-3 July 2019. 18 pp. First Thai-language version of 20 April 2019 (unpublished): “ความสัมพันธ์แบบอุปถัมภ์ภายใต้ระบอบคสช. และการเลือกตั้ง 2562 เครือข่ายใหม่ในรูปแบบที่เก่าแก่กว่า.” 19 pp.

Viengrat argues that “embedded local political networks” [original italics] remain “a determinant of the future direction of Thai politics.” In the 2019 elections, the NCPO had also to deal with the “people’s network” that had been created in the preceding years, both the red and the yellow shirts. The members of both networks have been connected to “electoral political networks,” and they remain members of those networks. [MN: One might add that these aspects have important consequences for formation of individual political attitudes.] In her paper, the author wants to survey the “characteristics of clientelistic relationships” in the 2019 election. She sees clientelism as being about informal relations between politicians and between politicians and the people. This is about “‘behind the scenes’” politics that media and political observers have largely ignored. Doing so, however, will lead analysts “easily [to] misunderstand much of what occurred in the 2019 election.” From Viengrat’s perspective, there was a broad threefold trend in sub-national politics that the NCPO (National Council for Peace and Order) wanted to destroy. 1) Decentralization that followed on the 1997 Constitution had fragmented the monopolistic power of chao pho (political bosses). Instead, many smaller influential people occurred at the scene. Gradually, these “chao pho ceased to be main political actors in Thai politics.” [MN: One may well doubt whether the importance of chao pho empirically existed throughout Thailand, or rather mainly played out in an academic discourse that was excited by people like kamnan Pho in Chonburi but ignored the conditions in the great majority of Thai provinces.] 2) “Second, politicians competing at a national level began building alliances of networks with local politicians in the pursuit of victory in elections.” [MN: In fact, national-level politicians are upgraded local politicians. In this sense, it might be said that their existing alliances expanded to include local authorities rather than being newly created.] One also wonders whether the statement holds true that the previous form of sub-national politics “was regulated first and foremost through violence” (ibid.). 3) Regarding the relationship between the local politicians and the people in their area of influence, “programmatic or policy-based forms of identification” (ibid.) were added to the voters’ mix of electoral decision-making factors, which was previously dominated by the socio-political prestige (barami) that candidates had created in their area of political activity. Viengrat goes as far as stating that policy issues were “becoming the bread and butter of winning votes” (ibid.), though they did not entirely replace clientelistic relationships. Nevertheless, “political networks were increasingly bound up with political parties and assisted in the construction of party identification. Accordingly, the establishment of political machines based on party election canvassers subsumed the system of traditional phu mi itthiphon” (influential people) (p. 4). [MN: One would like to know a bit more about the empirical validity of the last sentence. Does Viengrat suggest the party-politicization of sub-national politics generally, or merely a greater role of political parties in national elections?] In any case however, “there was insufficient time for these trends to mature as they were interrupted by the time-reversing 2006 coup. The NCPO, then, returned to the old structures to extend its power after the 2019 elections. In doing so, the NCPO tried the old means of “suppressing influential people,” centralized and stabilized the bureaucracy (which, of course, included replacing provincial governors etc. with people loyal the coup group), and activating the networks of people loyal to them. Since state projects were implemented through “increasingly verticalized, hierarchical bureaucratic structures” (p. 8), the author anticipated (in case this trend continued) the re-emergence of chao pho because strong provincial bureaucracies can only be countered or bargained with by equally strong influential people in the provinces. The NCPO also tried to destroy local political networks, for example, by discontinuing elections of local authorities. Article 44 was extensively used to move against provincial-level politicians that the NCPO suspected of being opposed to them. On the other hand, Sonthaya Khunpluem was appointed mayor of Pattaya, and he later joined the NCPO’s Phalang Pracharat Party. Harassment of opponents was used in conjunction of cutting off access to state funds. However, politicians still pursued their normal social activities, trying to keep their barami alive. [MN: After all, they wanted to be re-elected as soon as the NCPO would allow elections to be held again. Therefore, they could not just disappear from the public eye.] In preparation of the 2019 elections, the NCPO adopted the example of earlier military dictators in founding their own political party (Phalang Pracharat, PPRP) and then recruited constituency-level politicians with good personal voter bases to run under its banner. For such recruitment, were possible, meaning in cases in which candidates had some legal issues, the party used pressure rather than persuasion. Of 21 former Phuea Thai MPs who switched to the PPRP, 20 were elected. At the same time, competitors encountered obstructive measures and the “power of money” (p. 16). This included the implementation of Pracharat projects at the local level to increase the visibility of the party, and plenty of rumors about great sums of money being spent on vote-buying.

Viengrat Nethipo. N.d. [2008?]. “Master of the Provinces: A province Influential Networks.” Manuscript. 25 pp. (Fn. 1: “This paper to be published in an edited volume supported by Core University Project, Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University, Japan.)

Viengrat shares the assessment that, at the provincial level, the Thai political order consists of informal networks centered on an “influential individual.” These networks are concentrated “in a particular area.” With decentralization since 1997/1999, these informal networks expanded into contesting and occupying local government positions. At roughly the same time, the emergence of the Thai Rak Thai Party meant that “national politics [was connected] with local politics.” Moreover, decentralization substantively increased politicization, simply by making a great number of executive positions accessible through elections and by supplying these newly elected executives with considerable budgets. Consequently, the informal political networks “shifted their focus to utilizing the local government budget.” Regarding the role of informal political networks, Viengrat solely points to an inefficient and ineffective provincial state bureaucracy. For some reason, the lack of institutionalized and inclusive political parties as an enabling factor does not occur in this analysis, although it could be argued that informal networks at the provincial level operated as functional equivalents to political parties. In other words, the political party’s lack of vertical expansion created a political space that was appropriated by these informal political networks. One might also doubt that there is a hierarchy of networks dominated by “influential politicians” that starts at the national level and then moves down to provincial, constituency, and local levels. After all, those “influential politicians” in the Thai Rak Thai Party were locally elected MPs. It was only their rootedness in sub-national networks that brought them to the top as MPs-in-factions. They would then interact with other such position holders and factions within TRT, and this set of informal personalistic inter-factional networks was referred to as “Thai Rak Thai Party.” Besides her analysis of “influential people” (a concept that could be seen as having become increasingly obsolete; having political influence as a locally elected MP, for example, and being an “influential person” close to a chao pho are not the same things), Viengrat provides some useful information about the situation in Ubon Ratchathani province. She describes the emergence and political role of a monopolistic and violence-prone businessperson-cum-chao pho, Chaisiri Ruangkanchanaset, the son of Chinese immigrants. Unlike other such persons (she refers to Charoen Pathdumrongchit, or “Sia Leng,” in Khon Kaen and “Kamnan Poh” in Chonburi), Chaisiri did not only support election candidates but entered politics himself, making it to the position of minister of commerce. He was murdered in 1996, reportedly on the order of his son. With the change in the socio-economic and political context, other locally influential people became prominent political players. The author portrays the Kaltinan and the Kowasurat families, both with a background in the construction business. In the 2024 elections of executives of the Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAO), Kan Kaltinan, a son of family patriarch Kriang Kaltinan (he had entered the Thai Rak Thai Party as a member of Sanoh Thienthong’s Wang Nam Yen faction), was elected the PAO’s chief executive (nayok). He succeeded to defeat the female leader of another informal political network that was, like him, connected to the Phuea Thai Party, not without the massive electioneering help of Thaksin Shinawatra.

Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker. 2008. “Thaksin’s Populism.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38 (1), 2008. A revised version under the same title appeared in Populism in Asia, eds. Kosuke Mizuno and Pasuk Phongpaichit, pp. 66-93. Singapore: NUS Press, in association with Kyoto University Press, Japan, 2009.

(Annotation based on the revised version.)

Thaksin Shinawatra and his policies have often been labeled “populist.” However, neither his political outlook nor his policies were “populist” from the beginning, that is, from the time leading up to his first election triumph in 2001. At that time, he was rather seen as a “modernist reformer championing businessmen in the face of economic crisis,” while his trademark policies (such as the 30-baht health care scheme or the village fund program) were more traditional means of mustering electoral support from the majority of up-country voters. Thaksin first tried to use popular pressure when he was in danger of being disqualified from politics during his asset declaration case between December 2000 and August 2001. The move towards a more clearly populist approach seemed to have occurred between March 2004 and January 2006 in reaction to increasingly heavy attacks on his style of politics. This concerned both the lead-up to his second electoral triumph in February 2005 and the public protests that happened from late 2005 and early 2006 (first by Sondhi Limthongkul, and then by the People’s Alliance for Democracy, PAD, of which Sondhi was a leading member). “By the end of this period, Thaksin’s populism had expanded beyond a policy platform into a distinctly new form of politics.” The three key elements of this “new form of politics” were rights-based responsive policies, an identification of Thaksin with the people, which generated “a powerful public image [that] was new [in Thailand] and broke many local conventions,” and Thaksin’s portrayal of himself as the means through which the mass of the people could transform their wishes into policy action. Though Thaksin’s political style had been authoritarian from the beginning (in Pasuk/Baker’s first book on Thaksin, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, which appeared in 2004, his authoritarianism loomed large, while populism was still entirely absent), it was only his shift to populism that “gave him a means to justify this authoritarianism as an alternative to the liberal model of democracy.” That Thaksin could move into this direction was due to the fact that previous political leaders (one might think of Anand Panyarachun, Chuan Leekpai, Banharn Silpa-archa, and Chavalit Yongchaiyut) had failed to react on the policy needs of the broad masses of the people in Thailand’s informal sector, including the country’s majority of voters in the provinces. Thaksin, on the other hand, “connected with the emergent political demands and aspirations of the informal mass.” And he could turn them into key factors of his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party’s electoral politics, with the “implicit message that old-style politics, and the whole liberal-democratic bundle, had done little for the mass of the people” (in fact, many NGOs shared Thaksin’s view that the representative system had failed to deliver in Thailand, see Naruemon Thabchumpon 1998, but they wanted more direct participation, rather than populism, a word unknown at the time of Naruemon’s article; a similar view of the problem was held by the drafters of the 1997 Constitution, but they saw the solution in the creation of a strong leader, though they eventually thought that Thaksin had become too strong). Yet, in terms of its internal structure, TRT did not develop any participatory mechanisms, instead reducing its huge membership to nothing more than names in a “database for electoral campaigning.” This was perhaps the most important reason why, similarly to what had happened to another populist, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Thaksin could be toppled relatively easily when the established elite started its counterattack, and was successful in its military coup of 19 September 2006 (the Red Shirts developed only in reaction on that coup, and outside of Thaksin’s political party). Finally, Pasuk/Baker refer to Anek Laothamatas’ criticism of Thaksin’s populism, (Thaksina-prachaniyom, or Thaksin-style populism). In his book, Anek placed his hopes into welfare-state policies, but even more into the “political solution” of a “mixed system,” in which electoral democracy would be subjected to the monarchy and elite rule. After yet another anti-Thaksin coup in May 2014, the 2017 Constitution, one might say, realized Anek’s “political solution” of eliminating Thaksin-style populism, and the significance of electoral politics, from the Thai political system. When Pasuk/Baker state that 2006 saw a “rupture in Thailand’s democratic history,” this had become even more significant, and potentially longer lasting, a decade later. Thailand’s “old institutions, along with large sections of the intelligentsia and middle class, [continued] to fear [not only Thaksin’s populism, but also the politization of the rural masses and thus] electoral democracy itself.”

Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker. 2014. “Populist Challenge to the Establishment: Thaksin Shinawatra and the Transformation of Thai Politics.” In Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Politics, ed. by Richard Robison, pp. 83-96. London and New York: Routledge. (Paperback edition; first published in 2011.)

The transformation mentioned in the title refers to Thaksin’s role in further undermining the remnants of the earlier domination of Thailand’s political system by a military and civilian oligarchy (what Riggs in 1966 had labelled “bureaucratic polity”), and the emergence of mass politics. Thaksin came to power at a time when “decades of uneven development and limited distribution of power” had led to pent-up pressure for more participation and better government performance. The socio-economic and political circumstances then turned Thaksin into the catalyst for a “mobilization of mass forces on a scale not previously seen in Thai politics.” The authors summarize the rise of Thaksin and point out that the early opposition by a number of groups made Thaksin change his modernist approach of the 2001 elections to a populist one in the run-up to the 2005 elections. He portrayed himself as a “unique instrument for translating the will of the people into action,” and rejected parliamentary procedures, judicial institutions, and public debate “as obstacles against him fulfilling this mission.” This approach increased the opposition by royalists, high-level civil servants and soldiers, and a range of socio-political activists. To them, the monarchy came to be seen as a possible “counterweight to [Thaksin’s] democratic legitimacy.” [MN: Connors, in his 2008 “Article of Faith,” had argued that the use of “royal ideology” in the protests of the People’s Alliance for Democracy in 2006 was an attempt to liberate the Thai people from Thaksin’s authoritarian oppression-in-the-making, though he also saw that ideology as oppressive.] Pasuk and Baker continue by briefly describing the subsequent events, such as the Yellow Shirt protests, the increasing role of the judiciary, and the military coup of September 2006. The latter led to the formation of the Red Shirt protest movement. Both the Yellow and the Red Shirts indicated that “participation in Thailand’s national politics has penetrated deeper into the society and acquired a new intensity.” The authors assume that the middle class, though initially in favor of parliamentary democracy, seemed to have become insecure “about their own weight in this emerging mass politics,” and thus joined the Establishment in rejecting “both the idea and the institution of parliament,” including the “electoral principle” [already Anderson 1977, in explaining the middle class’s participation in the right-wing reaction against open politics and the concomitant turmoil, had referred to “the insecure new bourgeois strata,” though the context conditions for that insecurity were much different at that time; moreover, given that the Bangkok-based middle class is predominantly Chinese-Thai, their motivation to protest might well have stemmed from the perceived attack on their patron saint against ethnic discrimination, King Bhumibol]. However, one might rather say that both still supported the theory of parliamentary democracy and electoral legitimacy but certainly opposed its practices and structures as they operated in Thailand. Finally, Pasuk and Baker point to the regional dimension of the conflict (North/Northeast versus South), and to crosscutting “ideological convictions about monarchy and democracy.”