Little to Do With Democracy

Posted September 17, 2008

Every so often Thailand steps close to the brink, pundits dust off an old explanation for the peculiar instability of its democratic institutions. In essence, poor, uncouth provincial masses are said to want out of democracy something entirely different from what the more educated, value-driven Bangkok middle-class has come to expect. On occasion, each group is prepared to resort to decidedly undemocratic means to impose its own idea of what “democracy” is all about.

The conventional wisdom tells us that voters in the provinces—about seven out of every 10 of the king’s subjects—could hardly care less about policy or ideology. Most are moved by their deference to patrons and local authority figures. Most vote on narrow parochial concerns. And most are blithely willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder. As a result, elected legislatures are typically stacked with representatives whom the urban middle-classes despise for their boorishness and gross incompetence. Inept, predatory administrations, in turn, generate profound disillusionment in Bangkok—triggering a crescendo of support for military intervention. The cycle begins anew when the urban middle-class finds military rule unpalatable, takes to the streets, suffers the requisite number of casualties, and somehow forces the military back to the barracks.

The same narrative recurs with some variation in the Bangkok press as well as in writings that are openly sympathetic to the plight of provincial voters. But while the deep fault line between town and country is no doubt an important reason why Thailand never quite ceased to drift in and out of military dictatorship, it is by caricaturing the interests and aspirations of urban and provincial voters alike that this story most spectacularly fails.

Provincial Thais, for their part, are not nearly as foolish as those who alternatively belittle their loutishness or romanticize their innocence would have us believe. Weak as they were because of intermittent repression and internal divisions, until very recently political parties never offered much in the way of clear programmatic distinctions. The widely shared notion that the unsophistication of provincial voters would likely prevent them from making reasoned judgments about rival campaign platforms, therefore, has gone largely untested. Ironically, while former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is loathed in Bangkok for buying or otherwise rigging elections, his enduring popularity is much less a function of his ability to outbid the competition in the market for votes than it is the consequence of his policies. As Thailand’s richest man, Mr. Thaksin could play the money game as well as anyone. But the real game-changer was that Mr. Thaksin, in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, crafted a simple platform that resonated with upcountry voters well beyond the popularity, wealth and stature of any local candidate. Famously, the cornerstones of his rural program were an agrarian debt moratorium, a one million baht loan fund for every village, and a 30-baht-per-visit health-care scheme.

Provincial voters rewarded Mr. Thaksin in spades. His party, Thai Rak Thai (TRT), won an unprecedented near-majority in the 2001 elections and a still more commanding mandate in 2005. As expected, when Thailand re-emerged from military rule in late 2007, the same voters handed the People Power Party—TRT’s latest incarnation—another decisive victory.

Much like the boors sweating it out in the rice fields, the Bangkok middle classes are neither as high-minded nor quite as elitist as the opposing versions of the conventional wisdom suggest. Their democratic ideals and good government values never prevented them from meekly acquiescing to corrupt, repressive governments—notwithstanding the occasional bursts of mass indignation that punctuated Thailand’s long spells under the thumb of ghastly military regimes. And the reality is that the Bangkok middle classes do not spontaneously take to the streets every so often a government is in power that draws most of its votes from the provinces. It is simply that the issue of corruption only becomes politically activated when such governments are in office.

Once again, while the support of urban white-collar voters is needed to bring down an elected government through extra-constitutional means, any outrage against the government’s intolerable degeneracy can only be stoked and mobilized with the resources of urban elites. And, for the Bangkok elites, the very idea of elected government is fine only insofar as they are calling the shots. It’s when they don’t that they turn to the military for deliverance. If they can do so with a straight face, the high-minded elites will invoke the need to re-establish “true” democracy. When that argument is no longer serviceable, they will argue that Thailand cannot afford democracy so long as most of its citizens remain bumbling imbeciles eager to sell their votes to all manners of murderers and thieves.

Case in point is the People’s Alliance for Democracy, the movement currently engaged in a tense standoff with the Thai government. Formed in 2006, at first the PAD grounded its opposition to Mr. Thaksin in the least controversial of these two claims. In five years at the helm, after all, Mr. Thaksin had thoroughly eviscerated democratic institutions. But it was not the extra-judicial killings, the vote buying, or the muzzling of the press that set this group off. The real issue was “Thaksinomics.”

Once again, on this count the PAD has a decent case to make. There is no question, in particular, that Mr. Thaksin’s policies are first and foremost an instrument of political patronage, not one of genuine rural development. But that’s not the point. The so-called blue-blood jet set of the nation’s capital—the heart and soul of the PAD—have made extensive recourse to their own political connections to get contracts, moneys, favors, and concessions from the government on the taxpayer’s dime. This group, in fact, enthusiastically supported Mr. Thaksin’s meteoric rise to power, at a time when he promised Bangkok’s battered business community greater protection and access to the policymaking process. Shrewd electoral calculations based on a simple head count, however, in time shifted the focus of “Thaksinomics” from big business in the city to mom-and-pop rural operations. Among the blue-blooded elites, any love for Mr. Thaksin was bound to be short-lived.

The PAD got the military coup it wanted in September 2006. But when the military went back to the barracks, a year thereafter, it became clear that the coup had accomplished little. Faced with yet another electoral defeat, and the certainty of many more still to come, the PAD that stormed back onto the scene in 2008 now proposed to get rid of democracy altogether. And it now sought to pass off a musty old rummage of reactionary proposals as the “New Politics.”

In May of 2008, the freshly reconstituted PAD launched a slumbering sit-in near the site of historic clashes between protesters and the authorities. Confronted with decidedly less than massive participation—and painfully aware that political change in Thailand only happens when blood flows copiously through the streets of Bangkok—PAD leaders repeatedly baited the police into using force to disperse the crowds. Time and time again, the nation held its collective breath as the movement announced to the press that a violent crackdown was imminent. Former Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej—a bit of a blowhard, but thankfully no fool—stepped back every time, refusing to hand the PAD the bloody shirt its leaders were anxious to wave around Bangkok.

All this is to say that the rift between the Thai rural masses and the Bangkok middle class has very little at all to do with democracy. At stake here are not competing versions of democracy, but rather the control of government resources that the vanguards in both camps value far more than the worthless, disposable constitution du jour. In this old-fashioned power struggle for the right to plunder state coffers, “democracy” is but a rhetorical bludgeon. And in this fight—vast differences in education, wealth and status notwithstanding—the urban middle-class is every bit the pawn of the Bangkok elites as provincial voters are the hapless prey to unsavory local bosses. Both constituencies have little to gain from either side prevailing in this longstanding confrontation. But every so often when Thailand steps close to the brink, it is invariably they who are asked to put their lives on the line.

Federico Ferrara is assistant professor of political science at National University of Singapore.