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Party Fabrication: Constitutional Reform and the Rise of Thai Rak Thai

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2016

Allen Hicken
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Abstract

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Among the most interesting questions in Thai politics today is how to account for the rise and (until recently) the success of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party. This article describes and analyzes some of the factors that contributed to the rise and success of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai, arguing that neither Thaksin's personal assets nor the effects of the crisis are enough to explain Thai Rak Thai's rise and success. It focuses instead on the 1997 changes to Thailand's constitution. These institutional reforms were crucial because they altered Thailand's political-institutional landscape in fundamental ways. The reforms provided new opportunities and incentives for political actors that Thaksin and his party adeptly took advantage of. The argument presented is that the key reforms that helped pave the way for the rise of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai were those reforms that helped reduce the number of political parties and that increased the power of the prime minister relative to coalition partners and intraparty factions.

Keywords

Thailandelectionspolitical partiesdemocracyinstitutionsreformThaksinSoutheast Asia
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of East Asian Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , December 2006 , pp. 381 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © East Asia Institute 

References

Notes

An earlier version of this article was prepared for the International Conference of Constitutional Reform in the Philippines, Antipolo City, Metro Manila, Philippines, July 8–9, 2005. I thank participants at that conference for their comments and am also grateful for the comments of attendees at talks at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center, Michigan State University's Asian Studies Center, and the University of Michigan's Southeast Asian Public Lecture Series. Special thanks to Sombat Chantavong, Michael Nelson, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.Google Scholar

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16. If the MP is a constituency MP, a bielection is held to fill the vacant seat. If the MP is a party list MP, the seat is filled with the next person on the party's list. As a result, cabinet members are generally selected from party list MPs. Candidates must also now hold a bachelor's degree and abide by a new more stringent asset declaration requirement before they can run for office.Google Scholar

17. Formally it was the king who appointed the senators, on the advice of the prime minister.Google Scholar

18. SNTV is no longer used in South Korea, and since electoral reforms in the 1990s, SNTV is only used for elections to the upper chamber in Japan (see Hicken, and Kasuya, , “A Guide,” for more details about these electoral systems).Google Scholar

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20. The effective number of electoral parties during this period was more than seven.Google Scholar

21. As discussed in more detail below, most Thai parties were also highly factionalized, which further multiplied the number of political actors. Parties were generally not unitary actors but, rather, party factions. See Ockey, James, “Business Leaders, Gangsters and the Middle Class” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1991); Chambers, Paul W., “Factions, Parties, Coalition Change, and Cabinet Durability in Thailand: 1979–2001” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2003).Google Scholar

22. For exceptions in the area of macroeconomic policy, see Christensen, Scott et al., Thailand: The Institutional and Political Underpinnings of Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1993); and Hicken, Allen, “Parties, Policy and Patronage: Governance and Growth in Thailand,” in Campos, J. E. L., ed., Corruption: The Boom and Bust of East Asia (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Hicken, Allen, “Parties, Pork and Policy: Policymaking in Developing Democracies” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002).Google Scholar

24. This is measured using the “effective number of parties” (ENP) formulation. ENP is defined as 1 divided by the sum of the weighted values for each party (Laakso, Marku and Taagepera, Rein, “Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 12 [1979]: 3–27). In effect, what ENP does is weight party according to its size: parties with large vote shares are weighted more than parties with small shares. Hereafter when I refer to the number of parties, I will be using the ENP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Specifically, the M+1 rule states that the number of parties should be approximately equal to the number of the seats in a constituency +1 (Cox, Gary W., Making Votes Count [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). So, given that most Thai constituencies had two or three seats, we would expect the effective number of parties in each constituency to be between three and four. What's more, the number of parties should vary by district magnitude, with more parties in constituencies with more seats.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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27. Thailand exhibits poorer aggregation than either Brazil or India—two countries notable for their lack of cross-district coordination.Google Scholar

28. However, by themselves cleavages are probably neither necessary nor sufficient to produce poor linkage.Google Scholar

29. The difference between Thai Buddhists and the Thai Muslim minority in the South has never given rise to separate, cleavage-based parties.Google Scholar

30. Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy.” Google Scholar

31. Cox, , Making Votes Count; Cox, , “Electoral Rules”; Chhibber, and Kollman, , “Party Aggregation”; Chhibber, and Kollman, , Formation of National Party Systems; Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy.” See Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy” for a discussion of other variables that affect the coordination calculation.Google Scholar

32. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the influence of the Senate waned as the bureaucrats and military officials were gradually replaced by representatives from the private sector and business.Google Scholar

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34. Author interviews with party officials, Bangkok, January-June 1999 and May-August 2004 (anonymity requested).Google Scholar

35. One of the most striking features of the 1997 constitution is its call for decentralization. Political and economic power has traditionally been highly centralized in Thailand. To the extent decentralization actually leads to greater political and economic power at the subnational level, coordination incentives should decrease. However, the decentralization provisions of the constitution had not been implemented at the time of the 2001 elections and were still in their infancy in the run-up to the 2005 elections. As a result, it is too soon to assess the effects of decentralization on cross-constituency coordination. I briefly discuss the progress toward decentralization in the conclusion.Google Scholar

36. Since complete constituency-level data are not yet available for the 2005 Thai elections, I have reported only estimated results here. However, an analysis of the preliminary data that do exist suggests a continuation of the trends that began in 2001.Google Scholar

37. TRT later gained an absolute majority when a smaller party decided to merge with TRT shortly after the election.Google Scholar

38. Thailand's system did not generate the degree of intraparty competition that occurs in systems where there are fewer seats than copartisan candidates in a given district, such as in SNTV systems.Google Scholar

39. Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy.” Google Scholar

40. Hicken, Allen, “How Do Rules and Institutions Encourage Vote Buying?” in Schaffer, Frederic C., ed., Democracy for Sale: The Causes, Consequences, and Reform of Vote Buying (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, forthcoming).Google Scholar

41. The constitution suspended this rule for the inaugural 2001 election.Google Scholar

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43. Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy.” Google Scholar

44. In fact, candidates and parties have adapted their vote-buying strategies to the new electoral environment. For some examples, see “Dirty Politics: Vote-Buying Goes Hi-Tech,” The Nation , January 31, 2005.Google Scholar

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48. Illustrative of this point is the prominence of the Thai Rak Thai name and party logo on candidate posters—a departure from earlier eras when information linking a candidate to a particular party was often downplayed in campaign materials.Google Scholar

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50. As the recent experience of Japan demonstrates, it is also possible that the personalism of the constituency races could bleed over into the party list race (McKean, Margaret and Scheiner, Ethan, “Japan's New Electoral System: Plus ça change …,” Electoral Studies 19, no. 4 [2000]: 447–477).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. The electoral procedure for the Senate—the single nontransferable vote—should also contribute to the endurance of personal strategies. Under normal conditions, SNTV is the epitome of a candidate-centered electoral system where parties take a backseat to individuals and factions. Thailand's version of SNTV goes beyond most other examples. Senate candidates are prohibited from belonging to a political party and are also not allowed to campaign for office. Since candidates cannot rely on party label to distinguish themselves from other candidates or campaign on policy differences, they have instead cultivated personal support networks similar to those used by House candidates. In fact, successful candidates have often been family members of prominent politicians and so rely on existing support networks (Nelson, Michael, “The Senate Elections of March 4, 2000 [etc., etc.],” in KPI Newsletter 1, no. 3 [2000]: 3–7).Google Scholar

52. Hewison, , “Crafting Thailand's New Social Contract.” Google Scholar

53. Hicken, , “Parties, Pork and Policy.” Google Scholar

54. Other parties also recognized the opportunity to pursue new electoral strategies and attempted to do so. They were less successful in part because of their association with the crisis and/or the costly economic reforms adopted in its wake.Google Scholar

55. Whether the new institutional powers were sufficient is a more difficult question, given the available evidence.Google Scholar

56. Chambers, , “Factions, Parties.” Google Scholar

57. “Sanoh in Open Rebellion,” Bangkok Post , June 9, 2005.Google Scholar

58. Some claimed that the government had amended the foreign ownership laws—increasing the percentage of foreign ownership permissible from 25 percent to 49 percent—in order to pave the way for the sale of Shin Corp.Google Scholar

59. The Constitutional Court's ruling came after the king of Thailand refused to directly intervene but instead urged the courts to rule whether the April poll was constitutional.Google Scholar

60. This likely delay is the result of the need to appoint new members to the Election Commission, which by law is a sixty-day process.Google Scholar

61. It appears Thaksin and the Thai Rak Thai still command solid majorities in most of rural Thailand outside the South. Even in Bangkok, the center of anti-Thaksin mobilization, Thai Rak Thai enjoys a plurality of support among voters: 42 percent of Bangkok voters say they will vote for Thai Rak Thai in the next election as opposed to 16 percent for the opposition Democrat Party (“MPs Have a Chance to Slip 90-Day Chains,” The Nation , May 11, 2006, available at http://nationmultimedia.com/2006/05/11/politics/politics_30003789.php).Google Scholar

62. For example, the limits on party switching have not stemmed the flow of candidates seeking to join TRT but have made it nearly impossible for dissatisfied TRT members to switch parties.Google Scholar

63. For a discussion of this in the context of budgetary policy, see Hicken, , “Constitutional Reform and Budgetary Politics.” Google Scholar

64. Hicken, , “Constitutional Reform and Budgetary Politics.” Google Scholar

65. See Pasuk, and Baker, , Thaksin, for a more detailed discussion of the partisanization/marginalization of these superintendent institutions.Google Scholar

66. Painter, Martin, “Thaksinocracy or Managerialization? Reforming the Thai Bureaucracy,” Southeast Asia Research Center Working Paper, May 6, 2005, available at www.cityu.edu.hk/searc/WP.html.Google Scholar