Until the 1970s the politics of local communities and those of the capital were reiatively independent. Thus earlier studies of rural Thai society paid little, if any, attention to national electoral politics and justifiably so (see, for example, the papers in Neher l There were few links between the political centre and rural areas through the administrative system, Scott, writing in the language of the paradigm of the day, was able to assert in the mid 1970s that vertical integration of patron-client clusters did not go much beyond civil and military bureaucratic circles, and that rural patron-client clusters were "of purely local significance' and were "not highly politicised'