Democracy’s quality and breakdown: new lessons from Thailand

This paper assesses democracy’s quality with reference to Thailand under the recent Thai Rak Thai government. It enumerates some of the conceptual difficulties that arise in these types of assessment exercises and discusses lessons that can be drawn from Thailand. The analysis is based on a framework that involves electoral mandates, policy responsiveness, and accountability

The author notes that the analysis reveals a ‘mixed’ record under Thai Rak Thai where government’s strong mandates and high levels of responsiveness were counterpoised by corrupt practices, limits on civil liberties, and gross violations of human rights, behaviours in which many elites acquiesced. It shows that attempts to impose accountability through direct action by elites, further eroded the quality of democracy. The paper demonstrates that democracy’s quality can be diminished in ways that far from placating rival elites so inflame tensions that it can finally break down.

Key concluding points include:

• Thailand’s recent political record demonstrates that mass-level constituents can be loosened from particular sets of social interests, whether forged through capitalist industrialisation or other kinds of structural pressures
• the performance of the Thai Rak Thai government was once understood by citizens as responsiveness and was government was electorally rewarded. Later, these perceptions were abruptly reconfigured by rival elites as executive abuses and corrupt practices to be punished, exploiting the plasticity and vulnerability of constituents
• where executive abuses and corrupt practices advantage elites without alienating mass-level constituencies, the low quality of democracy that results may enable democracy to persist. But where these actions exclude some elites and constituents, prompting them to respond by diminishing quality further, democracy may be strained to the breaking point.