แปลบทความวิจัยDefining Thai politics
Classifying the Thai political order has long proved difficult. Fred Riggs
(1966) famously argued that Thailand was a ‘bureaucratic polity’ – in other
words, that bureaucrats and military officers ran the Thai state largely for
their own purposes. Hewison has rightly criticized this extremely influential
model as essentially static, pointing out that it ignored longstanding oppo-
sition and resistance, and that it failed to anticipate the emergence of mass
politics in the 1970s (1996: 75).1 Later discussions of Thai politics were often
framed in terms of democratic change and political transition (Chai-Anan
1990). Following a 1991 military coup that invalidated simplistic assumptions
about Thai democratization, many studies emphasized the changing political
economy and the rise of civil society, accompanied by more limited projects
of political reform (Connors 1999; McCargo 2002). This article adopts an al-
ternative approach: it argues that Thailand’s political order is characterized
by network-based politics. From 1973 to 2001, Thailand’s leading political
network was that of the reigning monarch, King Bhumibol. Since 2001, the
primacy of palace-based networks has been challenged by the remarkable
rise of the billionaire telecommunications magnate turned prime minister,
Thaksin Shinawatra.
Since the ouster of the Thanom-Praphas regime in 1973 King Bhumibol
of Thailand has been far more than a figurehead, and by no means