Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy

7. The Rural Constitution

So far in this book, my exploration of Ban Tiam’s political society has addressed “political” issues in broad terms. I have examined political society as being made up of specific contexts in which people cultivate connections with sources of power in the spiritual, commercial, and bureaucratic world. In this chapter I move to a much more familiar version of political behavior: that which is associated with elections and party politics. Many commentators are inclined to see this domain of activity as being very different from the more informal and socially embedded forms of political behavior that I have considered so far. For political scientists, electoral contests are a central element in a more formal “political society” in which organized political parties aggregate the views of citizens into policies that are implemented by winning control of the legislature. Anthropologists, and others similarly attuned to the grass roots, often tend to see party-dominated elections as a procedural exercise that has little meaningful relationship with local power dynamics. But in examining relationships with power in Ban Tiam, the formal-informal distinction that underlies these perspectives is not particularly useful. Candidates in Thailand’s formal elections cannot escape the informal political culture in which they are embedded. Local political culture and formal electoral culture are closely woven together. This political culture is poorly understood , largely because existing approaches to rural electoral behavior often resort to either disparagement of the ignorance and parochialism of downtrodden rural voters or wishful thinking about nonelectoral social movements that will challenge the hegemony of capitalism and the state. 190 7 The Rural Constitution Discussions of rural political culture have taken on a particular salience in Thailand in recent years. Following the overthrow of Thaksin Shinawatra’s government in September 2006, the coup makers based their claim to legitimacy on the argument that the Thaksin government’s electoral mandate was illegitimate because it had been bought from an unsophisticated and easily manipulated rural electorate. The denial of electoral legitimacy was fundamental in justifying the removal of a government that had garnered strong electoral mandates. And, with a further election scheduled for late 2006, those seeking to defend the coup relied heavily on the argument that the electorate was in no position to make a reasonable judgment about the Thaksin government ’s well-publicized faults. Faced with the likelihood that Thaksin’s party would win yet another election, the coup makers argued that the army’s intervention was the only way to resolve deep political divisions. The fact that the electorate continued to support Thaksin was, in the eyes of many of his opponents, clear evidence of voter irrationality and the ongoing failure of the electoral process. There is nothing new about this argument, nor about its use in justifying military interference. Political commentators have regularly asserted that the Thai populace, and especially the rural populace, lacks the basic characteristics essential for a modern democratic citizenry and that deficiencies need to be overcome via elite-led education. Accounts of the deficiencies of the voting population often focus on three perceived problems, which draw on well-established discourses about patronage, apolitical peasants, and the dangers of money politics.1 First, uneducated rural voters are parochial and have little interest in policy issues. Lacking a well-developed sense of national interest, they vote for candidates who can deliver immediate benefits. Second , given their poverty, lack of sophistication, and disinterest in policy, they are readily swayed by the power of money. Vote buying is said to be endemic. Cash distributed by candidates, through networks of local canvassers, is said to play a major role in securing voter loyalty. And third, rural electoral mobilization is achieved via hierarchical ties of patronage whereby local influential figures can deliver blocks of rural votes to their political masters. Studies documenting the political rise of provincial businessmen and godfathers have added considerable strength to this patron-client model of rural political behavior . Within this model there is very little sense of an economically and politically engaged rural electorate that plays an active role in evaluating the personal and policy merits of candidates. The Rural Constitution 191 The literature on rural political behavior in Thailand, and elsewhere in the region, provides two main alternatives to this negative perspective on rural political culture. One perspective emphasizes rural people’s nonelectoral political mobilization, in cooperation with civil society organizations, to resist the incursions of both state regulation and...