Unravelling Intra-Party Democracy in Thailand

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This survey aims to analyze the state of intra-party democracy (IPD) in Thailand. IPDis defined as a characteristic of the distribution of decision-making power amongmembers and leaders within a political party along the two principal dimensions ofinclusiveness and decentralization. The amount of organizational details that could beused to describe parties’ procedures with regard to all aspects of their internal life isplaced into three generalizable categories: candidate selection, setting party policies, andcoalition formation procedures. In addition, this survey provides some background on theterritorial spread, membership developments and funding practices of political parties.
The overall finding is that the degree of internal democracy of political parties inThailand is quite limited. Thai political parties tend to be ‘electoral parties’ with weakorganizations, low policy capacity and vague ideologies. The development of politicalparties since 1997 (and before the 2006 coup) can best be described as a process of partycentralization without institutionalization. This has produced significant consequencesfor the realization of internal democracy within political parties: weak internalorganization decision-making remains largely informal and is controlled by a limitednumber of party elites. This general result has important implications regarding theprospects of party politics in Thailand and democratic consolidation.

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