The period under discussion saw an ideological shift towards what may be called 'developmental democracy'. This involved the gradual immersion of thinking about democracy in terms of how to relate 'Thai characteristics' to democratic rule, and plans towards developing the population such that it was fit to democracy. This project was framed by the doctrine of political development, a doctrine which was deployed in order that state forces could incorporate sections of the population into the state's symbolic codes and its administrative structures. The new democracy was encased in a pastoral type rationality that sought to lead people towards forms of self-discipline and practice conducive to statist-led developmental democracy.
In the 1960s, the circle of democratic induction conducted by the Ministry of the Interior was restricted to village leaders and local notables. This initial focus on the local level reflected the centrality of village and rural leaders in the state's administrative surveillance and control of the people. Through various agencies, intellectual and administrative, the state put into play discursive regimes aiming to inculcate in selected subjects a particular national democratic ideology. Democrasubjection as a strategic project of state actors to incorporate village leaders and notables, and by extension 'the nation of villages'. into its ideological hegemony, was based on a complex discursive practice linking instrumental notions of community development, participation and administrative democracy with the promotion of ethical excellence. Emergent at first, these aspects grew in clarity as the state hegemonic project raced against the communist challenge in the rural areas and the liberal capitalist challenge in Bangkok. There is certainly a contradiction in the existence of this project and the more general function of the state. While capitalist development was aided and abetted by the economic and administrative arms of the state, and threw up massive disparities in wealth and opportunity, statist democratic discourse rhetorically attacked the pursuit of self-interest and capitalist aggrandizement, promoting a national ideology of the common good. The claimed universal role of the state as guardian of its subjects and definer of the 'good' was secured by its national development work that pitted it, at least rhetorically, against the unbridled profit-lust of capital. In that sense, democracy education was about promoting the state as the articulator of the general will, allowing for the continuance of the state over particularistic capitalist actors.