While Riggs’s approach remained an influential theoretical approach for understanding
governance in Thailand, and some other countries, for many years (see Jackson 1978;
Girling 1981), it was criticised on the grounds that it was evolutionary, that it did not
account for change or conflict, that it contained within it similar characteristics to those of
conservative social Darwinist theories, and that it was deterministic (Hewison 1989, 1997,
5–6), as many of the structural-functionalist and modernisation theories of that era had
been. In addition, the emergence of a wide array of extra-bureaucratic forces in Thailand
that led to the inclusion of political parties, student and farmers’ groups, workers, and the
middle class into the polity in the 1970s (Ockey 2004b, 144) and business in the 1980s
(Anek 1992) led to questions about its continued usefulness as an accurate description of
politics, irrespective of its shortcomings as a theoretical approach (Hewison 1997, 6).