Sondhi Limthongkul and Kraisak Choonhavan are good communicators. At the SOAS seminar last Saturday they presented a clear vision of political change in Thailand. As Nicholas Farrelly indicates in his previous summary post a key aspect of this vision is the political mission of Thailand’s middle class. In Sondhi’s eyes the urban middle classes (not just in Bangkok but in provincial centres throughout the country where the anti-Thaksin no-vote was strongest) can act as a vanguard for changing the political hearts and minds of the rural population. Sondhi argued that his so-called pro-democracy movement has to focus its attention on the most receptive social groups (that is, the middle class) who can then extend their new forms of political knowledge to the more slow-moving masses.
This is an unashamedly elitist vision. Sondhi baulked (claiming his poor English had generated some misunderstanding) at a playful but penetrating questioner who wondered out loud if uneducated rural votes should be disregarded altogether. Of course, rural people should have the vote, Sondhi protested. But both he and Kraisak argued that democracy in Thailand was fundamentally flawed given the lack of political education among the rural voting masses. Any doubts about just how patronising this perspective really is were removed when Sondhi commented that northern Thai villagers supported Thaksin because they are both “kind hearted” and “soft headed” (unlike the hard headed Democrat voters of the south). Both he and Kraisak painted a picture of voters in the north and northeast as pliant, respectful of authority and so mired in traditional social relations as to be easily persuaded by populist handouts.
In my question to Sondhi, I put it that this view ruled out the possibility that rural people in Thailand are capable of rational political decision-making. In response, Sondhi cited the impact of the free trade agreement with China on Thai garlic farmers. Longer term readers of New Mandala may recall that this is an issue that I am have been following for some time as a result of ongoing research in a garlic producing village in Chiang Mai province. Sondhi suggested, correctly, that many farmers have suffered as a result of the influx of cheap Chinese garlic (though he had nothing to say about the diverse ways farmers have responded to this changing economic context). His punchline was that northern Thai farmers did not even know that Thaksin’s free trade policies had caused them such pain. In their politically ignorant state they were incapable of sheeting the blame home to Thaksin and, as obedient as puppies, cast pro-government votes in return for populist handouts.
This is plainly ridiculous. Farmers are well aware of the free trade agreement and regularly talk about the local impacts of the talaat seri (free market) with China. They are only too aware of the large quantities of Chinese garlic coming into the market place. Does Sondhi really think that farmers don’t discuss (with brokers, officials, middle-men, politicians, researchers, NGOs and each other) the policy and economic factors that impact on their livelihoods? Does he really think that they don’t read the newspaper, watch television or listen to the radio? Is he unaware that a not insignificant number now have internet connections? In fact, over the past couple years the government’s compensation scheme (which pays small subsidies to farmers who reduce their area of garlic cultivation) has been a regular topic of discussion in garlic growing areas. This scheme, which is directly related to the influx of Chinese garlic, is much criticised for its ponderous administration and painfully slow payments. And discussions about these specific subsidies regularly develop into broader discussions about the perceived lack of support by Thaksin for the agricultural sector.
The point I am making is that farmers (if I can generalise rather too liberally) are politically rational actors who weigh up the pros and cons of various policies and administrative pratices. The image of farmers blindly supporting Thaksin out of a politically unsophisticated respect for authority is a gross stereotype that is being wielded by Sondhi and others to undermine the importance of elections in the Thai political system. It is a gross sterotype that was liberally used to attack Thaksin and it is now being deployed to provide ideological endorsement for the coup.
I am sure that many rural dwellers in Thailand would happily participate in new forms of education. Most, quite sensibly, see education as a key strategy in developing secure and diversified modern liveilhoods. But before a middle class educational vanguard is unleashed on the rural electorate it may help if their leaders go back to school themselves. Cast aside the country bumpkin stereotypes and go and talk to farmers. Simple as that. Sit down in a field hut and talk to farmers about prices, policies and politics. Stay the night, eat the food, and go out and do it again. There may be some surprises in store.
Taking a few hundred baht to vote for a particular individual at election time does not sound like ‘rational political decision-making’ to me.
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Thanks Andrew I have just come across your site and I’m impressed. I feel that Patrick Jory’s comments are apt and that we must continue to ‘maintain the rage’ at every opportunity. However, there is a new government in power, legitimate or not, and it is their ideas that we must critique. I found the comments made on the post “Exhibition: The King – “The Father of Innovation” fascinating and I hope I can read more and that they followed up in a more systematic way.
To return to the post at hand I found that your comments about the political sophistication of rural folk also match my observations from a small group of villages in northeast Thailand.
In my mind finding ways of continuing to disenfranchise the rural voice is going to be one of the biggest hurdles for the Bangkok elite to overcome. It will be interesting to see what they come up with
Here are some suggestions for Sondhi. . The witch-hunt that has already begun is always a good place to start of course, however, it will probably run out of steam after a year or two and some long-term solutions will be need. Previously you needed a Bachelors Degree to stand for election – perhaps this stipulation could be extended to be eligible to vote. Or perhaps Sondhi could follow the good old Australian lead with our proposed citizenship test. A test that assesses an appropriate amount of “Thainess” coupled with an examination of an a adequate command of Thai language – if you get over 75% then you go on to the electoral role. Or how about some form of gerrymander that gives a weighting of 5 to 1 for urban votes. It shouldn’t be too hard to sell something like this – if you can justify a coup you should be able to justify just about anything.
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The Coup 19/9/2549, which is absurdly resurrected on the Thai soil in itself, is possibly indicated that Sondhi’s understandings of Thai democracy and politics in general has some problems.
The idea to say that ‘given the lack of political education among the rural voting masses.’, which is also cliamed and used by the so called Political Reform Committee (later is transformed to be Kor- Por- Kor and ‘ a national security commission,) is also poor and absolutelylack of knowledge of Thai politics in the countrysides in particular.
The resurrection of the Coup is perhaps needed another way to think or rethink of in trying to undertsand the Thai democracy. To me this is a story of the Power Elite. it is also represented a real picture of Thai social structure.
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Hi Ngaandeeleg, thanks for your comments. On the issue of vote buying – do you really think that farmers’ votes can be bought for a few hundred baht? In my experience, as I have said before, farmers accept money from all parties (who wouldn’t) and then vote for whoever they want.
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Andrew, I agree a few would vote for whomever they want, but understand that most will vote for who they took the money from because they are worried about ‘bahb kram’
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Andrew, what is “your experience” with vote buying? I think that you overlook the point that while people can, theoretically, take money and vote for who rhey want, in practice people discuss who they vote, networks are very tight knit and even in the case of the new sub-district elections where people vote for Nay-yok OBT, the buyers of votes (hua Kanaen) are Kin, vote buyers know, can estimate and predict within a close enough range to expect certain outcomes and when these outcomes do not occur, punitive measures are taken against either the most likely recalcitrant, those that most assume to not have kept up their end of the bargain and sometimes random targets and the idea that this is a possiblity and these tactics are very effective in assuring levels of compliance. If your experience was ethnographically grounded you would also know that people are very careful who and how they take money from. The anonimity that you are ascribing to the polling box is a farcical idea as it can neither be separated from the sets of relations that the voting is taking place in, nor from the cosmological considerations that inform people’s choices, such as Nganadeeleg has pointed out. What you say here is certainly commonsensical to an Australian but when ascribed to the Thai population the question “who wouldn’t” is definitely the Thai people you are saying would act as you would. An idea born of a simplictic or distant understanding of local political processes in Thailand. Certainly a particular class version of events.
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Hi Ant
Hopefully Andrew will recount his experiences with vote buying – it will be an interesting story. I have had some experience of vote buying in the northeast of Thailand that may be worthwhile contributing. I wasn’t present at the last elections but was there for the pervious election in held 2005. Yes vote buying happened big time and all parties contesting the seat had their hand in it. All I can say Andrew is that the villagers in my area would wish that it was a few hundred baht but in reality the sums handed across were more like 20 or 30 baht per family. I agree with you Ant in that in the area that I’m familiar with discussion about whom the best candidate to vote for can be quite vigorous at times, however, it is highly sophisticated and taken very seriously. Hua Kanaen (its not the term that is used in my area but its close enough) from all parties do come into the villages and do hand out small amounts of money. The villages accept the money – from all who offered it – gratefully with a smile and kind words. However, after the caravan had left for the next village there was general disappointment with the amount of money handed over. It was pointed out to me, on the number of occasions, that they would have received more money but it was believed (shock horror) that the Hua Kanaen had creamed off most of it for themselves.
In my experience the types of ‘sets of relations’ that I’m guessing that you are referring to in your post do exist – but only as a type of palimpsest. They are sometimes acknowledged, but to the rural folk that I know, the reality of everyday life tends to inscribe a more pragmatic representation of the world.
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Chris, I know the kind of vote buying “caravans” you are talking about but don’t think that is the limit to it. I think they constitue a public spectacle that is bordering on purely public relations almost compulsory for general good will for all involved. Like walking around to all the houses in sub-district elections, doing it doesn’t guarantee a vote but not doing it certainly is remembered in an unfavourable light. There are more strategic ways of buying votes and far more subtle or blended in with the social landscape. For example around songkhran, new year, funerals, marriages etc etc etc. you get politicians gifting strategically groups of local lads, influential people, inwhole arrays of social situations that generate a “bun khun” debt as well as being normative behaviour of “phu yai” who occuy or aspire to occupying office such as local, district etc politicians (often taxpayers money used). While banned for up to two months before elections (appearing at public situations like this, according to the new constitution) hua khanaen are sent in as proxies. They also get paid in some circumstances according to success etc.
The deliberations on who to vote for are very serious and inevitably include considerations of who gets what from who if such and such gets in and as the peole do not exist in isolated, egalitarian individualistic frameworks but more socially oriented and interlinked circumstances, consderations for the individual are rarely made independent of one’s social self in terms of sets of relations one has, as other’s proseprity is usually beneficial to self in such contexts so long as other is someone you are allied with and so on. So thereis a related and vested interest created through and with vote buying. The intimidation, killing and what not still goes on and under Thaksin the involvement of national level politicians and public servants in local politics was tangible.
The idea of dismissing vote buying off hand as ineffective in this context is too simplistic. While opportunism such as taking money from every party is likely the money being given in those circumstances is not expected to reap the rewards that more strategic, planned and negotiated vote buying does…a distinction needs to be made here where the anonymity of the ballot box should not be mistaken for the nature of relationships between people before during and after elections, it might seem appropriate, culturally familiar but it is not representative of what’s happening.
In terms of the gross stereotype of farmers voting for Thaksin because of a “politically unsophisticated respect for authority”, is the respect and fondness that so many older folk have for Sarit and the paralells they drew between him and Thaksin unsophisticated or common sense considering how these kinds of leaders are credited with bringing stability that many bemoan as having gone…is it inconceivable for “farmers” to vote for this as they want/perceive a need for it, that that appeal is actually not unsophisticated but very pragmatic. I would say that economics isn’t the be all and end all of rationality here or there.
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First I sure that Andrew has a lot of expereine of Thai rural life.
What is so soapy for these discussions. when ‘something wrong’ happened in Thai politics like the Coup 19-09-2549, the old plot is immediately brought out and framed the ways peoples think, saying that the Thai rural folks are poor uneducated, they could be bought, while the middle class in BK in particular is seen as a kind of hero, rich of pol awareness and of course well educated, in addition, the Thai govt, whoever or which parties come to mechanise it those state takers and controllers would be painted by corruption, abuse of power for thier interest groups, and so on and on.
And in this case, the Coup leaders are a kind of ‘a white knight’ who borns to be a hero and solve the problem just in time. And the Thai folk, most of them solute him.
It is the story of the Power Elite, why one wold not think of this? And this is the Thai ways of operating De-Moc-Crasy.
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Wasan, I am sure Andrew has a lot of experience of rural Thai life and would be interested to hear more about it. The “plot” of Thai politics with its predictable scripts that you bemoan here is, I agree, tedious. I don’t think your “middle-class” is limited to Bangkok, however. Chiangmai, Phitsanulok, Khonkaen, Khorat, Songkhla to name a few, have significant mddle-class populations with similar trajectories, aspirations etc as Bangkok. Much of the rural myth that you, like me, find tedious, is perpetuated more by the narrow analyses of economists and political scientists, both local and foreign, and I think that Andrew’s take on vote buying and rural politics resonates closely with these. I certainly don’t see the coup leaders as white knights nor do I subscribe to ideas of vote buying as corrupt. I think both are normative processes in Thai politics and needn’t be valorised as anything more.
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I wrote and carefully used ‘a white night’ because most Thai, if they had follwoed what had happened before the Coup, would also think that this is not a hero story. But unfortunately many Thai middle class thought that the so called Kor Por Kor, please read it in Thai you will get some kind of sexual sounds here, was it.
Let me think in another way, though it would sound like an absurd fiction, this is perhpas in fact understanable, since many Thai rurals have migrated to BK for a few decades and they are now counted 9 in 10 of the whole population of this metropol. So it is in fact this number that represent so called Thai middle class in BK. And many Bangkokians in fact recently mogved to the north.
Rural-Urban dichotomy may be already useless here!.
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Absolutely! The rural urban divide is a farce, Thailand is divided along clear cut lines of class that happen to find a disproportionate number of elite in the urban centres and the poor classes in the bush.
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Hmmm – I’m not too sure that we can dispense of the so-called problems with the rural masses so easily – particularly because this continues to be used as a prime justification of the coup.
I’m also a little concerned about this idea that coup d’état are normative behaviour in Thailand that should be either accepted uncritically, or worse still, as an integral part of ‘Thai’ democracy.
Also I am in no way dismissing notion of ‘vote buying’ as being ineffective – it is a crucial aspect of democratic practice. Its part of the process where candidates, and their supporters, get out there and gather enough support to get elected. My take on it is that you put forward credible policies and it is considered that you can deliver on your promises you effectively ‘buy’ the vote.
I’m not a ‘Thai’ specialist and the only experiences that I can talk about come from a small group of villages that I am familiar with. In the 2005 election one of candidates, the son of an incredibly well connected and extremely rich local rice miller/money lender, offered everything from doubling the price of rice, an international airport, and making it rain more often. The local folk took his money, drank his beer, enjoyed a huge morlum concert/ election rally and put his posters up absolutely everywhere and on everything. It was such a great party and everyone had such a good time. However, on election Day he received only a very small proportion of the vote (I think 8% from memory). Can you explain that?
Also, Wassan can you please point me your source of information on the demography of Bangkok. They are very interesting figures – I’d like to be able to use them in a project that I’m working on.
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I agree with Andrew Walker that the people take money from all parties but vote for the person who they want. Kin, Houa kanan, village head person, Khamnan do not have as much influence as some people think and more often than not members of the same family votes for different persons. Furthermore, one person often votes for different parties for their party list and for their electorate MP.
I would like to draw the attention of this forum to a new kind of soul buying, which is actually not new but is emerging on a much greater scale (vote buying is not appropriate here because we don’t know if we will have an election or not and if we do, what its format will be) which the junta is trying to do at the moment. First, look at the new health care policy, as of today the “30 baht for all illness scheme” of Thai Rak Thai party which were condemned by middle and high class Thai will be replace by “Free health care service for all”. Then please also take a close look at flood solving effort. Finally, the new economic policy “self subsistence or self sufficiency” is, not well accepted, even by some of their own appointed minister. Is there anything different from the so called “populist propaganda” of the previous ELECTED government that they condemned?
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Hopefully one difference will be in the extent to which they line their own pockets…….time will tell.
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Chris, I certainly think Thai politics and coups are synonymous and will continue to be. Elections are rituals of legitimation of the state and so in a state as militant as Thailand is, a coup constitutes an election (legitimate state). This may shock or even offend the economist and political scientists out there, (but remember t’was they who in the nineties were proponents of “tiger economies Asian values and what conditions lead to a democracy?” type of research…all rubbish if you ask me, and they are now the source of the majority of the structure of the facile debate about the coup. They, like many of our time are swept off their feet by the ideological myth of democracy and completely overlook local political processes as they are, and frame these processes in terms of how they could, should or are supposed to be (which is always understood according to the theoretical model never any emperical reality). It is this kind of intellectual orientation cum cultural myopia that allows for people to say (think) that vote buying isn’t an issue anymore and so Thaksin’s huge popularity is legitimate (according to laws of democracy) and at the same time decry extrajudicial killings but never make the obvious link that extra judical killings were about a restructuring of the political landscape and it wasn’t the populrity of the war on drugs that got Thaksin in again but his very effective elimination of his party’s opponents, economic and political through a combination of elimination and intimidation.
Health care policies, international airports or whatever else is *promised* is public relations along with the 20 and 30 baht hand outs and door knocks in elections, behind all this is where the real politics is happening and always has and always will. Thailand’s political culture is to be found scattered throughout the kingdom not concentrated in the metropolis of BKK alone. Thai politics are mercenary and no amount of post modern lens shifting and gaze tuning is going to change that fact.
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I am not sure anybody here have come across James Okey’s article in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol 46, No. 2 August 2005. to me this the only source that is able to explaine what has been on in Thai politics, though retrospectively.
For the poor or populatio in BK there is no precise figure but there is a goof work like Pasuk Ponphichit and Chris Baker on A History of Thailand, or Thailand: Politics and Economy, which can give you a very close figure of the population in BK and the scenes in this metrol. It is rarely found in other scholar works.
Oh if you have not read James Okey’s work you should also have a look on McCargo’s papers puls C.Wright Mills’s Power Elite. To me, again and again, the Coup and current Thai politcs is a story that goes beyond the so-called urban-rural, vote buying, city middle-class and the rural poor, and so and so.
These are the Thai ways of operating democracy of course, and it needs not to be the same as Western, or other Third world counrties like, Americam Africa experiences, as many of you here also agree and talk about.
So if you really wanted to explain and really understand what is on. First you accept the specificit of Thai Democracy, then you may need to think beyond something that invisibly blinds you from its focal point. Conciously or not.
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Interesting Wasan, and I would say I agree in great part with what you are saying here with the exception of 1. the recommendation of Okey and Baker etal. They are to me the flagship writers of the shallow and ethnocentric political science and economic perspectives on Thailand…
2. The urban rural divide you return to here would seem to be your own bug bear. I don’t think the division is being made out to be determinant on this blog, my own reference to it is simply that a lot of the political wheeling and dealing in Thailand necessarily goes on out side of BKK as the majority of the population is found there. I further insist that any understanding of Thai political culture be as grounded in this geographical area of political “practice” as elsewhere, say BKK etc. The migration patterns throughout Thailand you talk of may be so but must be understood in terms of class trajectories and the social mobility that the physical mobility allows…ie rural origin urban destination with a touch of social mobility is going to see a change in the person so yes the rural may be now a BKK urban middle-class person bu their alliegence is going to be middleclass lifestyle and values not rural farming etc.
My point on vote buying is that it is a normative practice like branch stacking is in Australia and so doesn’t warrant the attention and framing as an abberation that it receives and nor should it be dismissed as redundant, especially in the way it has been by political scientists.
3 The urban middle-class of Thailand and nuvo elite (socially mobile people who have left one class strata/fraction for another through education overseas or the like) are very much out of touch with other areas of Thai society, though they may claim otherwise and this should never be down played.
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Ant:
I was interested in your comments regarding Chris Baker and Pasuk Pongpaichit.
“They are to me the flagship writers of the shallow and ethnocentric political science and economic perspectives on Thailand …”
A big statement. Care to justify it?
I’m assuming you are Thai, and that you aren’t just some Aussie student sounding off….
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Outside,
My “big statment” comes from my own convitcion that much of the political science and economic frameworks/modelling for understanding Thailand, its political and economic processes “situations”, are grounded in narratives born of an ethnocentric epistemology. By this I mean political and economic studies of Thailand (and most of SEAsia), concern themselves with western global capital and western liberal democracy (procedural not substantive) and Thailand is written according to this narrative. Pasuk and Baker’s work epitomises this. However, I do not mean to say the details are necessarily erroneuos, just limited (fundamentally). Like Whyatt’s royalist histories, I acknowledge they are well detailed BUT their narrative structure perpetuates/reproduces and privileges a particular perspective that happens to limit discussion.
The nature of this modelling has time and again been shown to be out of line with what is actually happening. From the most recent coup through to East Tiomor, Suharto, economic crisis, this kind of modelling of what is happening in Southeast Asia has failed time and again to account for what is and or was happening and the myopia isn’t born of these being exceptional circumstances, rather the modelling is flawed and when events happen the models can’t cope. The rest of my posts here outline what I think the consequences are.
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Thanks for those references. I was familiar with the work of Pasuk and Baker and think they provide a valuable contribution, amongst many of the voices to be heard inside and outside of Thailand, to Thai studies. All though, when I read them I did have issues with some of their stuff (but that’s OK – it happens with everything that I read) and would sometimes like to have seen a bit more evidence – I absolute love their funky writing style – I’m so envious!!! I have seen some of the other stuff you mentioned and I do think it is of high quality. But, as political (so called) ‘science’ is not my thing I tend to read it late at night when I need to be sent off to sleep so I don’t really get that much of out of it. Thanks for the lead on James Okey I found that to be pretty interesting – but best of all when I went to look it up there in the same issue was the article by Jonathan Rigg ‘Poverty and livelihoods after full-time farming:
A South-East Asian view’ – much more down my alley.
I’m an old white fella who loves sitting under the shade of a tree on a stinking hot day with other old folk, chewing the fat. And thankfully I do get the opportunity to do so for a couple of months every year in the northeast. And in my humble opinion I feel that their voice is as legitimate as any other in the discourse on what is best in their interest as well as for the rest of the country.
As for my ‘bug bare’ about the urban – rural divide. Well it is mine and I’m happy to keep on banging on about it. But, I don’t think that I’m totally alone here. I was interested to see, on my usual Sunday morning scan of the Thai English media, that Aree Wong-araya felt that he needed to respond to rumors that there are so called ‘political movements’ in the Northeast that are attempting to disrupt the military rule of the new government. I’d love to know more about the fear and loathing that is going on in Bangkok that is fuelling these rumors. Also I noticed that Surayud flew into military bases in Sakon Nakhon and Biri Bam the other day where people were then brought in to these bases to meet him. (Does anybody know if there is any problem with Surayad moving freely around the countryside?) The reported purpose of his visit was to assure the locals that his military government will continue Thaksin’s so called populist policies that benefited rural folk. He had to deny media questioning that the purpose of his visit had anything to with the ‘non existent’ rumors. But apparently, according to the report Surayud had earlier conceded that there was a link between former communist insurgents in the northeast and those who are now voicing opposition to military government. (Thaksin in the bed with communists!!! – now that’s an interesting thought.) Also he met up with 20 former communist insurgents at the Sakon Nakhon base where Surayad assured these folk that he would eventually get around to carrying out the promises he made to them (that was providing them with a few head of cattle and a couple of acres of land in return for coming out of the hills) when he was the military commander overseeing the area more than 20 years ago. Now that is a great track record to build faith and trust on isn’t it?
According the Bangkok post both these stories were sourced from the TNA
So I guess there is at least 3 of us left in the world that continue to flog the ‘old dead horse’ of the urban – rural divide.
Oh, I nearly forgot. Wassan, I would still love to find the source of the figures you referred to about the population make up of Bangkok – you know the one you mentioned here:
“since many Thai rurals have migrated to BK for a few decades and they are now counted 9 in 10 of the whole population of this metropol.”
Can you point me to them?
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I am surprised that among the recent comments on the rural electorate and vote buying in Thailand no-one has mentioned the excellent study of rural politics by Daniel Arghiros, DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT AND DECENTRALIZATION IN PROVINCIAL THAILAND (2001). It is much better informed that almost anything else I have seen lately.
I recommend it to all readers of New Mandala.
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Grant, I would agree with you that his work is both, better informed (ethnographically so) and nuanced than other works in the area. My own cause for ommission of his work here is not that I think it ethnocentric like Baker and Pasuk but rather, that like them the wrong kinds of questions are being asked. If I was to recommend any reading here now it would be Louis Dumont’s From “Mandeville to Marx: The genesis and triumph of economic ideology.” 1977 purely as a way of “revising assumptions” as Nicholas discusses in today’s topic “Where to for Thai Studies”. The project of democratisation and development is integrally intertwined with economic ideology and some of New Mandala’s contributor’s comments regarding relationships to and of exchange (vote buying) being somewhat unreflective, I see the problem as deeply ingrained and a good ethnography alone won’t challenge this sufficiently. However, a very good account nonetheless.
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You academic fools . . . why study Thai vote-buying or vote-selling at all? Selling the vote is criminal and I challenge anyone to tell me different. Buying the vote is criminal and absolutely distasteful . . . and politicians who took advantage of those rural villagers to entice them with handouts in exchange for their vote was unforgiveable corruption.
But there should be no excuse. People who sell their votes should be jailed, without exception. After that . . . bingo . . . virtuous democracy blooms!
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First I would love to thank Dr. Grant Evans, for a good suggestion. Second, to Christ White, for the figure you need I do not have it, and no ones perhpas have it, if you really need the exact numbers.
Everyone who have experienced Thailand, BK in particular, realise that there is no ‘real’ data on this, but we might estimate, quite systematic and reasonable though, about this. For examples, you may bring a number from the household registration first, plus a study by the demographic sociologists at Mahidol Univ. Then you observe the flows of people travelling ‘back to thier orginal hometowns’, though temporarily, during the festivals, particularly the Thai New Year Festival. Fourth, many Thai leaders, scholars, journalists, and a super star of you like, Taksin, Gen Sondhi, and perhpas a present PM – sorry I did not have time to check for this, for examples, all have thier countryside background. They are, possibly Pasuk and Baker would call, members of ‘a new generation’ who outed of thier rurals to the Centre and never returned. The point I would just like to say is you may not need the figure but reality that you can make sense of.
To Ant, I do not see any point you raised to Pasuk and Baker’s writing as a kind of works that built upon what u called ‘an ethnocentric epistemology.’ Can anyone on earth being neutral? I do not think so, besides thier work hust another work but it si worht to read and learn from them, particularly for the non-Thai, schoalars or not, who can not read Thai fluently.
For the post ‘Where to for Thai Studies’, sorry if I just read only a few word, caused the question to me is sounded really boring, but would like to suggest some ideas here.
The Thai Studies is not simply the study of Thai State and Politics, but unfortunately, Thai Studies in AUS seems to be dominated by this, have a look from Thailand Update for example. There are many things more wider than this diplomatic issue.
I would rather, in short, love to try to undestand, though it is just a little seen, such as street gatherings, a female dancer from Cafe restaurant come to show thier performance to solute and support the soldiers, city folks in Chiang Mai made thier wedding photo album with a tank, to memorise thier love that exploded during the Coup!!!, peoples went to touch the tanks and the soldiers with thier M16 because they never saw these quite often, some might ask or guess for a lukcy number for Lottery next round, and so on. All these also happened in the aftermatch of this Coup.
They are some kind of knowlegde that worth to explore in Thai Studies.
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Vichai
What about the middle class people in Bangkok who are enticed by the mass transit systems to vote for a political party? Unforgiveable corruption?
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Thanks Wasan
Silly me, I always thought that Bangkok was an extremely diverse multi ethnic city where about half the population – or their parents or grand parents – migrated from other nation states.
Yes, I would have really liked to see the evidence. 90% of the population Bangkok being made up of people moving from the regions seems like such a great story. I had seen the stuff from Pasuk and Baker but thought that they had overstated the size of the ‘new generation’ to support their argument for the amount of structural adjustment that they thought was happening in the economy. – you know the sort of thing you do when your writing a book. I guess because there is no firm data on this matter its hard to tell – and the data that you often do get from Thailand like the literacy rate and the unemployment figures (I think from memory is 98% and 1.4% respectively) doesn’t match my experience at all. (If these figures are true I must know just about every illiterate and unemployed person in Thailand). Is there any reliable sources of information?
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To Khun Chris White again,
Frankly, I think , and really think, it is not an easy taks to get this information and no one could guarantee whether it is from a reliable source. Deal to the so called ‘data-base recording and processing system’ in Thailand, I the Thai myself never truste any information or story that release from the Thai govt. Though I might have been able to find this figure from other organisations or foreign sources, and if I found it I would let you know immediately, I do not think you need any exact figure or reliable sources to affirm this. The point is, as you know, they are flows of people to and through BK for at least a century, but since the Siam was turned into Thailand, this flow has been accelerated and changed dramatically. The number I raised might be wrong or not exactly correct, but this is a very close picture of the propostion of multi=region=ethnic=background of the so called Bangkokians.
When I mentioned this I just would like to propose that urban-rural dichotomy has its problem. And I contend that to understand Thai politics, democracy in particular, this frame is not suitable anymore. Like some peoples here, to me the rurals or whatever they are called and seen, such as the poors who are uneducated or less educated, who ‘not ready for Democracy’ (Gen Sondhi was one of many who spoke out this idea on air – TV) , this kind of idea or alike to me is so dumped! From my counryside experience, the peoples who are called the poors or the rurals they are really clever, at least they know which plants and animals that can be eaten for survive. The idea which the urbanites in BK might not have.
So not neccesary to ask, whether they know those candidates or politicians who offer them good or bad policies, good or bad interests, fake or real notes, and so on.
Sorry if I just repeated an idea other peoples here have already posted
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You are absolutely right Andrew.
The excuse of vote buying is a morally poor man’s way of believing why society does not conform to his political ideals. It is a vain and naive way to accept an outcome against his own choice.
Shame on the leftist leaners who spout corruption and blame it on the rural mass for their perceived lack of education.
Shame on you.
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