Bangkok, May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand

6. The Socio-Economic Bases of the Red/Yellow Divide: A Statistical Analysis

Ammar฀Siamwalla฀and฀Somchai฀Jitsuchon 64฀ 6 THE฀SOCIO-ECONOMIC฀BASES฀OF฀ THE฀RED/YELLOW฀DIVIDE A฀Statistical฀Analysis Ammar Siamwalla and Somchai Jitsuchon The political conflict in Thailand during the past six years, involving increasingly large numbers of participants outside the usual elite, has elicited a great deal of speculation on the background of the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts. Foreign journalists, relying on interviews with the red-shirted demonstrators, have tended, for example, to conclude that most of these demonstrators are rural, poor, and primarily from the Northeast. Yellow Shirts, insofar as they have been able to attract interest from these journalists at all other than as the group that closed down Suvarnabhumi Airport, are said to be supporters of the “elite”. These views nicely complement each other and simplify matters for their audience. Matters are a little more complicated, as was pointed out in a presentation made by one of us during the 2009 Year-End Conference of the Thailand Development Research Institute.1 Based on an extensive survey, that presentation came to the preliminary conclusion that there 06฀BangkokIT.indd฀฀฀64 12/6/11฀฀฀11:11:58฀AM The฀Socio-Economic฀Bases฀of฀the฀Red/Yellow฀Divide 65 is no substantial difference in the social backgrounds of people who support the Red and Yellow points of view. It is important to bear in mind that, in both that presentation as well as in what follows, we are not studying the demonstrators themselves, who are only about 1 or 2 per cent of the population, but the much more numerous people who support the points of views expressed in the demonstrations. This paper uses the same data as the earlier presentation, but it substantially refines that presentation’s preliminary finding by using what we believe to be a more thorough and objective method to classify respondents into Reds and Yellows and then to find out what socioeconomic backgrounds appear to make people choose to lean towards the Reds, the Yellows, or neither. The paper is somewhat unusually ordered: the next section describes the data source used and proceeds directly to the results of the analysis. We leave to the end the technical details of how we proceed from the data to the results. THE฀DATA The data used both in the earlier presentation and in this paper come from a survey of political attitudes conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO), using a questionnaire prepared by the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). The objective of the survey was to answer broad questions relating to economic inequality to the political divide that affects Thai society. This questionnaire was appended to the usual Socio-Economic Survey (SES) conducted by the NSO every year. It was administered to a sub-sample of SES respondents, numbering 4,097 households, in August and September 2009. This period was some months after the bloody Songkran of 2009, and half a year before the March–May 2010 demonstrations. From this sub-sample, we find data from 3,655 households usable. This combination of SES data and data from the appended questionnaire allows us to link the responses to questions in the latter to the very rich data on the household socioeconomic characteristics in the former, larger survey. In the appended attitude survey of political attitudes, we use responses to the question, “What are the causes of the current political conflict in Thailand?” as the major input in a classification of respondents into three groups: “Reds”, “Yellows”, and “Neither”. 06฀BangkokIT.indd฀฀฀65 12/6/11฀฀฀11:11:58฀AM Ammar฀Siamwalla฀and฀Somchai฀Jitsuchon 66฀ Note that while the response to political attitude questions and the consequent political affiliation pertain mostly to the individuals chosen by households to respond to the survey, many of the socio-economic variables used in the analysis below refer to the entire household. RESULTS The statistical analysis detailed in the final section of the paper shows the following socio-economic variables to have some impact on the probability of an individual acquiring the political tag of Red, Yellow, or Neither. Age: Older people tend to be neither Red nor Yellow, with a slight tendency of younger people to be Yellow. Red support appears to come from all age groups. Economic Well-Being — Level: There is a clear tendency for better-off people to be Yellow. Thus Bangkok people (across all...