These doubts cluster around two main issue: civil society’s antipathy to the state and civil society’s antipathy to the market. The oppositional stance taken by many civil society organizations to the state is understandable given the memories of violent repression in the 1970s and the heavy-handed implementation of some rural development schemes. However it is also often informed by a localized ideological standpoint that situates appropriate forms of development and empowerment in community-based organization rather than in an engagement with the modern state. As in “new social movement” in other part of the world, many Thai civil society organizations have preferred to pursue “direct democracy” rather than “representative democracy,” seeking to limit the power of the state by creating semi-autonomous domains of local organization. This localism informs a position that explicitly turns away from the formal political process, regarding it as a corrupted domain of vote-buying power brokers. Elections are seen as mechanism for mobilizing voters merely to serve the interest of provincial and national elites. This negative view of elections brings some civil society advocates uncomfortably close to long-standing elite dismissal of the peasant voters as legitimate members of a democratic citizenry.