A diverse array of scholarship within the political economy school has emphasised a
broad range of different foci and actors. Anek’s “liberal corporatist” approach (1992) has
Autonomous Political Networks as a Challenge to Power in Thailand 5
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focused on the impact of organised business on the policy process.1 This important work –
and that of others (McVey 2001) – has brought to light the important role that extrabureaucratic
private interests play in contemporary Thai politics. While early work within
this school emphasised that economic policymaking has not come to be dominated by
business, it did effectively demonstrate that business exerts strong influence on the
political process and that “major decision-making has ceased to be the monopoly of the
bureaucracy” (Anek 1992, 153).