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With the brother-in-law of Thaksin Shinawatra now serving as Prime-Minister, Thailand’s democracy is set for another round of turmoil. Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat’s personal links with Thaksin will give the election-denying People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) a much needed energy boost. How far they are willing to push their ill-defined agenda remains to be seen.
Sometimes it can be useful to step back a little from the day-to-day battles of political life. The battles that have convulsed Thailand’s political elites over recent months and years may lead many to conclude that Thailand’s democracy is in crisis. It would be easy to dismiss Thailand as a country where democratic institutions have shallow roots.
But perhaps there are deeper democratic currents that deserve more attention.
A recent paper by Robert Albritton and Thawilwadee Bureekul examines the “state of democracy in Thailand.” (A draft copy of the paper is available here.) Its starting point is the observation that “democracy requires mass approval” in order to function effectively. This approval is not sufficient for a sustainable democracy – especially in the face of “determined elites who have access to instruments of military power” – but it does appear to be a necessary condition.
Does this mass approval exist in Thailand? According to Asian Barometer surveys cited by Albritton and Thawilwadee, it does. Surveys conducted in 2002 and 2006 suggest very high approval ratings for democracy in Thailand. In 2002, 90.5 percent indicated that they were “satisfied or very satisfied with the way democracy works in Thailand.” In the 2006 survey, undertaken just a few months before the military coup and in a context of political turmoil, the figure was 83.8 percent. Results from several other survey questions point to “high levels of ‘consumer satisfaction’ with the status of democracy in Thailand.”
Asian Barometer conducts surveys in a number of East Asian countries. So how does Thailand compare? I have not been able to access their full survey results, but one research paper they have produced has some very interesting findings. Here is an extract (pp 12-13):
As the first panel in Table 2 shows, the percentages of respondents expressing dissatisfaction with democracy vary to a significant degree: from nearly one-half in Taiwan (49%) and the Philippines (47%), one-third in Korea (38%) and Mongolia (30%) to only one-tenth in Thailand (10%). Those expressing satisfaction vary considerably from large majorities in Thailand (91%), Mongolia (70%) and Korea (62%) to bare majorities in the Philippines (53%) and Taiwan (51%). When these negative and positive ratings are compared, it is evident that East Asians tend to see their current democratic systems in a positive light.
The second panel in Table 2 shows that the percentages reporting that the current democratic regime performs better than in the authoritarian past vary considerably across the countries: from an overwhelming majority in Thailand (91%), large majorities in Mongolia (66%), Taiwan (66%) and the Philippines (60%) to a bare majority in Korea (52%). Those perceiving that the democratic system performs worse than the old authoritarian system, on the other hand, constitute minorities in all the countries. The size of these minorities, however, varies considerably from a very tiny minority in Thailand (5%) to sizeable minorities in Mongolia (23%), Taiwan (24%) and the Philippines (28%) and a large minority in Korea (39%). Overall, in all five East Asian new democracies, more people evaluate the newly installed democracy to perform better than the old authoritarian system.
Of course, there is always room for considerable caution when it comes to surveys of complex political sentiments. But there are some good indications here that Thailand enjoys a strong and deep current of popular support for democracy. Satisfaction with democracy appears to be significantly greater in Thailand than it does in some of its East Asian neighbours.
The current political crisis in Thailand has been engineered by opposition forces who are determined to paint Thailand’s democratic system as corrupt and ineffective. One of the main goals of their recent political protests has been to create an atmosphere of political crisis that undermines local and international faith in Thailand’s democratic processes. The way the government has responded to some of these political challenges has made the discrediting job of the opposition forces that much easier.
But perhaps the “crisis” in Bangkok is taking place against an often un-recognised backdrop of satisfaction with the way the Thailand’s democratic system works. Of course there are other political sentiments. The paper by Albritton and Thawilwadee argues, at length, that there is a culture in Thailand “that promotes inequality as the foundation of the society” and which consistently paints democratically elected governments as lacking in moral virtue. These are the sentiments that the PAD taps into so effectively. But the broad-based satisfaction with democratic processes documented in the Asian Barometer surveys helps to explain why the PAD’s authoritarian “new politics” has such limited electoral appeal.
Democracy seems to be very popular in Thailand.
I disagree with the conflation of liberal democracy and popular democracy in the conclusion of the paper. The paper only mentions ‘liberal’ twice, and I don’t think a democratic system for a nation can be wholly functional without an attachment to liberalism. The democracy the paper is talking of is simply electoral democracy which can be illiberal.
If Thailand were without international pressure, how would Bhumibol, and therefore the majority of people, value democracy? I think answering this question would prove more the current state of democratic health in Thailand. Although my question may be loaded, I do believe that with sustained popularity of an electoral democratic system, liberal empiricism can be acquired with all the mistakes that are about to be made.
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You seem to be highlighting the local tendency to ‘want to believe’ at any any cost. That desire is usually satisfied quite easily if enough politicians give the necessary inducements. Democracy would probably work better if the electorate were stuffed full of people who didn’t have a good word to say about their political reps. Things usually work better when folks are in a position to realize that any money that a politician pushes under the table has probably been previously stolen from themselves.
Look at the local education system for further example. Folks have been fooled into allowing the tutor system to teach most of the stuff that is supposed to be taught in schools. Having shelled out big bucks for this dubious privilege, students & their parents then expect tutor schools to be a magic bullet to their future. They thus think that they will absorb all of the useful info they will need for a future successful career without making any real effort to personally connect with the subject matter.
Your ‘feelgood’ results probably indicate nothing much more than a local desire to find the political magic bullet without actually having to personally lift a finger to make the political system really work.
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I wonder if Thai people perceive democracy to have worked better in their country partly because democracy in Thailand was not preceded, as elsewhere in Asia, by either a strong dictatorial state or complete chaos. While Thailand has of course had several coups, it has never had a prolonged authoritarian state in which the public have been encouraged (or coerced) into taking part by becoming members of a sole political party or joining a secret police.
In the 1960s, a highschool teacher in California conducted an intriguing experiment to discover how facism worked in practice – his students, for example, were taught slogans and a salute, and were encouraged to inform on each other and beat up any dissenters. What surprised the teacher was how much not only he, but his students, seemed to enjoy it.
Where authoritarian states of this nature have collapsed (as in Mongolia, or – to look outside the region – Russia), the citizens are left with little sense of purpose, and, apart from a minority who get rich on the back of regime change, often reduced economic circumstances. Moreover, the decades of authoritarianism have left the people with little idea of how to put democracy into practice. In such situations, democracy often flounders at best, and fails completely at worst.
In Thailand, where the dictatorships have not been marked by a strong central state or the dominance of a single party, underground democracy has been able to flourish to a much greater extent. Equally, the dictatorships have not done anything for the people – they have not, for instance, provided free healthcare or guaranteed a job. I would argue that just as West Germans tend to be more satisfied with democracy than their counterparts in the former East Germany, so too are Thais likely to be more satisfied with the democratic process than people in other Asian countries, in part because Thailand has, apart from brief periods of dictatorship, been generally more democratic.
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Of course one could always point out there are many versions of democracy or different interpretations of the word, and one could also point that that the researchers inform their informants as to which version of democracy they entertain, and so forth. But I think the main point of the paper is that Thai people in general prefer democracy than any other forms of government. I think this is highly significant.
In a way it seems to me hardly surprising at all to find out that Thai people prefer democracy. But it’s very surprising to see other people such as Koreans or what not do not seem to prefer it as much as Thais do. I think this latter finding stands more in need of explanation than that Thais prefer democracy. It should be rather obvious that a people anywhere would prefer that they are able to govern themselves rather than submit themselves to some higher authority?
The Albritton and Thawilwadee paper is done out of the context within Thai society where there has been widespread discrediting of democracy. This has gone on for as long as there is democracy in Siam or longer. And the argument is the same tired, old one. What Albritton and Thawilwadee have significantly contributed is to point out that, empirically speaking, the argument of the élites does not hold water. The élites would have it that Thai people prefer stability and the well intentioned guiding hands of the bureaucratic and urban élites rather than the chaos of democracy. But they are wrong. This should be a message to the PAD.
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Why not look at the survey that goes with the results to see what “democracy” means for the participants? Look at it at: http://www.jdsurvey.net/bdasepjds/easiabarometer/eab.jsp
I have to agree with Saroj’s statement that the results show that: “Thai people in general prefer democracy than any other forms of government. I think this is highly significant.”
This is important research, and while one might question its positivism and so on, these results deserve to go into the mix when thinking about the future of the Thai political system.
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Yes, there are different ways of defining democracy, but the minimum qualification is that governments are elected by the people. An authoritarian society may be perfectly benevolent, but, however “liberal,” “transparent,” or “uncorrupt,” it is not a democracy. Thais may not want mass democracy, but to call unelected governments “democratic” is absurd. Much of the debate about what is happening in Thailand argues that non-Thai concepts of democracy are not appropriate for Thailand. That may be true. My objection is to calling autocratic forms of government a “democracy.”
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In the chapter, “Developing Democratic Elections Under a New Constitution in Thailand,” we point out that only 70 % of respondents could formulate a clear concept of the meaning of democracy in an open-ended question. Among those who offered a definition, however, 38.2% said “freedom” or referred to “civil liberties.” 15.2% said “political equality;” 11.9 “Individualism;” 7.7 said “Equality, Justice, or Fraternity;” 7.2 said “Participation and Citizen Empowerment.” Less than 1% said “Good Governance” or a related term. In the 2006 survey, we also offered a fixed choice response. On this question there was a higher response rate, but the responses were very similar. In general, we find consistently that Thais have views of democracy very similar to residents of European and American countries. By the way, these are true probability samples of the population, face-to-face surveys conducted in the language of the the respondent’s home (including dialects).
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[…] of these results are consistent with results of an earlier study by Robert Albritton and Thawilwadee Bureekul that found high levels of satisfaction with the […]
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