Politics of the Northeast - a typical case study

General News - Thursday December 20, 2007

FOCUS / THAI POLITICS

Master of the provinces

Politics of the Northeast - a typical case study

By VIENGRAT NETIPO

The following case study is of a large province located in the southern part of the Northeast. Its social and economic structures are not much different from that of the rest of the country, where the majority of the people are poor agriculturalists living in rural areas, with less than 20% of the total population living in urban or municipal areas.

The politics of the province have seen only a limited number of competing political groups and in each particular period it has been dominated by a few groups of the political elite. Since the democratisation process in the '70s, the dominant groups have been influential networks. These networks depend on rural villagers and urban-poor populations as their base for success in popular elections. However, the province has a comparatively strong civil society, mainly led by intellectuals and NGO workers.

In the era of democracy, popular elections for local government organisations and national MPs have been held continuously since 1975. In the province, traditional elite groups still dominated municipal elections. It was not until the 1990s that the elite gradually lost key roles in local politics to influential individuals.

The Rise and Fall of the Classic Boss

The influential network in the province is considered a classic case in Thailand. As in the past, the province's most influential person or chao por (boss) achieved national fame and was widely known as the "chao por of southern Isan." Let's call him Chao Por A.

With the social status derived from his enormous wealth and his personal charisma, Chao Por A began to get involved in politics.

In the general election in 1976, politicians came to him and requested his support. This road to politics was similar to those of other famous "chao por" in provinces such as Chon Buri and Phetchaburi in that they assisted politicians in winning elections. In the beginning, he supported candidates vying for public office but later he ran for parliament himself. He successfully gained office and was later elevated to cabinet minister.

His successes in the political arena helped boost his image. However, he didn't patronise local politicians since he played politics himself, using his own economic power to win elections and attain a high position in cabinet. This is different from the cases of "Kamnan Poh" of Chon Buri and "Sia Leng" of Khon Kaen, both of whom patronised many local politicians and therefore could control a much larger voting base than Chao Por A.

Following the pattern of other classical "chao por", one of his tactics to maintain political power was to contribute to religious rituals or ceremonies traditionally organised by villagers. His contributions made villagers feel close to him, so they would vote for him, even though he wouldn't contribute anything more to them in return. The ties between Chao Por A and locals could not be characterised as unquestioned loyalty however, as villagers in many instances had no better choices to choose from.

The massive electorates in each locality were not clearly divided. During each election, Chao Por A ordered a few subordinates to coordinate with the local voting canvassers, who were usually community leaders. Their deals involved providing enticements to villagers in the form of cash. Vote canvassers would give money to villagers for votes. The number of votes were even calculated during the deal-making process.

This vote buying could be seen especially clearly on the night prior to the election, in a practice known nationwide as khuen maa horn (night of the howling dogs). Between midnight and 1am, vote canvassers carried a sack filled with banknotes around the village and visited each house to make sure the villager would go to vote for their "boss". The cost was as little as 20-50 baht per villager.

Apart from vote buying, Chao Por A also exercised violence. Even though he personally appeared to be polite and reasonable, he often used the "stick" to control his men. He also hired many gunmen. In the political arena, he deployed nak leng (hoodlums) ways to compete with opponents, which included threats to their lives and abduction. There was even a case where a vote canvasser was killed after the election results turned out differently from what had previously been agreed upon.

These tactics guaranteed Chao Por A's victory in elections for several terms. However, those tactics stopped working when he was defeated in an election in 1995.

A year after that, his own son hired someone to murder him, with the motive being personal conflict in the family. His son later committed suicide. Chao Por A died in 1996.

New Bosses : New Politics

After the death of the Chao Por A, a war between various political groups took place. The key competitors were two dominant families in the province, plus another old family struggling to maintain their hold on power.

Money remained the crucial factor in electoral campaigns. In the last election in the province, the minimum amount needed by a promising candidate in an electoral campaign could be approximated as follows:

- Candidates for Chief Executive of the PAO used 100 million baht;

- Candidates for Chief Executive of the case study province's City Municipality used 50 million baht;

- Candidates for Chief Executive of the TAO used around 5-700,000 baht ;

- Candidates for MP used 30 million baht.

In reality, the winners of each seat were likely to spend much more. Even though the vote canvassing networks may be well established, the final outcome of any election is ultimately up to the amount of money paid in the days before the vote. Thus, money is considered the most critical factor during a campaign period.

In recent years, vote canvassing networks and election canvassers have evolved to become more stable. Traditionally, the normal practice before starting a campaign was to approach individuals whom people respected and ask them to act as election canvassers. There might even be an agreement on compensation in terms of monetary payment or support after the election.

Such agreements would only be binding in the short term because election canvassers might change their minds if a larger sum of money or a better offer were given by another group. Clearly, election results depended on the tangible benefits at hand.

Nowadays, election canvassers have a very close bond to local administrative organisations at various levels.

Looking up from the tambon administrative organisation level, the council members and the chief executive of the TAO must decide clearly which network to join so that when they actually enter politics they can distinguish who is on their side and who is not. For instance, if one side was elected chief executive of the PAO (provincial administrative organisation), the TAOs that supported his group would receive more projects and assistance from the PAO than other TAOs. Furthermore, if the candidate they supported was elected as MP, more subsidies from the central government could be provided.

When considering development projects, budgets, policies and other official support, the relationship between politicians and people becomes more distinct than simply using power to patronise them, as was the case previously. This relationship structure, which is based on the distribution of tangible benefits, is replacing the old system of patronage in which the benefit received by the people was mostly the intangible one of having a representative in government.

Another factor keeping the vote canvassing networks of powerful groups intact is the creation of links through the benefits from the construction business through government projects. Community leaders who are TAO council members and part of TAO executive teams are largely minor contractors. Any TAO belonging to a specific political group will receive benefits in terms of construction projects.

In the new political competition under the lead of the Thai Rak Thai party, the official structure and laws related to elections based on the 1997 constitution have been utilised more and more.

The most apparent point was that teachers became key election canvassers of the Thai Rak Thai party because national-level politicians could interfere in the committees in charge of teacher transfers. Thus, if teachers whose wish to transfer to a desired area was fulfilled, they had to repay politicians by seeking votes for them during an election.

One trend of this new politics is the attempt by political groups to take as much control as possible of local administrative organisations at different levels, to facilitate their work.

New Pattern of Influential Networks :

Secure and Systematic

From the decentralisation of power in 1997, the first tangible change that might be seen is that in every district there appeared dramatically a new prestigious figure called than (master). These than are members of the local administrative organisation council and executives at all levels. In the past, than was used only to refer to those of executive rank in government; in the provinces the honorific was used only for governors and district chiefs.

The making of new masters in the local society indicates that power is really distributed, at least in terms of people's perceptions. For ordinary people, attaining a formal position simply means having power. The use of the title than also shows that the feudal culture of the bureaucratic system has transferred from the central government to local administrative organisations. This change should generate a major impact on influential networks, which had long been static. In the past, the main resource that an influential person held for maintaining his power was his strong connections with the authorities and that connection was not distributed to minor bosses.

Now, holding a formal position in local administrative organisations has become a more important resource for minor bosses. In this regard, it can be anticipated that influential networks will disintegrate into smaller networks and therefore the power of each influential person in a network would be more limited than in the past.

However, the past decade has still seen the networks in transition. The power arrangements have not been settled yet. Moreover, the rise of the Thai Rak Thai party added another important factor to the settling of the power structure at the local level. Therefore the emergence of more "masters" in local politics has not yet weakened the influential networks as expected. On the contrary, the case study revealed the following features of influential networks.

First, significant numbers of influential people have been able to establish more secure and stronger networks. This is because the new form of corruption they operate on is the least risky one: through the use of the government budget. In the past, the status of influential people was more risky as they were involved in corruption that needed a strong back-up, such as the concession business (in the '50s-'80s), and illegal businesses including casinos, smuggling, arms trading and drug trafficking (in the '70s-'90s). Those businesses thus became the breeding ground for the present batch of influential people. The involvement with the concession industry and illegal businesses easily created the rise and fall of different networks because competition was severe and often violent.

Second, the use of violence among influential people has apparently decreased. Although there is still the threat and the exercise of illegitimate power to make potential competitors apprehensive about any sort of opposition, rarely is assassination carried out between competing groups. This is very different from the competition between the classic chao por in the past, which was full of violence and murder, such as in Chao Por A's era in the studied province, or the Kamnan Poh era in Chon Buri. The violent scenes perpetrated by and for influential people have been seen less and less. This has misled people to think that influential people are now no longer around as they have all transformed themselves into "professional politicians".

However, the reality is that influential networks are more capable of monopolising power and business, and are better at interest allocation than ever before. In addition, their connections with the Thai Rak Thai party made this interest allocation even more secure and systematic. This tendency towards stabilisation is also found in other provinces.

Third, competition between influential people is decided by the electoral outcome. To win or lose depends very much on how much a candidate can draw from national politicians and how strong his connections with them are. Once a candidate takes office, his power depends on how much he can negotiate to bring projects to his province. This is how political networks connect national politics to local politics. The network starts from the influential politician at the national level, links with MPs in the provinces, and utilises all the local administrative organisation politicians as if they were agents of national politicians.

This has been possible because under Thaksin Shinawatra's government a large portion of the central budget was used freely by his cabinet. The amounts of money used to subsidise local administrative organisations in some areas were even higher than the annual budget of those organisations themselves. For example, the money approved by the Thaksin cabinet for Chiang Mai City Municipality was much higher than its annual budget. The case study province's City Municipality had only about 200 million baht allocated for its annual budget, but the central government approved a subsidy of almost 100 million baht per year. This enabled the Thai Rak Thai party to better position itself in negotiating with local administrative organisations all over the country.

Conclusion

The new politics described here have resulted from changes both to the state and to the structure of society. The state has been decentralised and is moving to depend more on legal and rational mechanisms of political competition, especially independent organisations such as the Election Commission. At the same time, the Thai Rak Thai party, whose power was based on its having been democratically elected, had implemented policies that brought ordinary people closer to state power by distributing political interests to the grassroots level. Therefore, the influential networks that had long existed in the middle between state power and society have had to radically adjust themselves. Those who could survive well in this new setting would become the leading networks and those who could not would disappear.

Whether this change will look like the "institutionalisation of influential networks" or like the "political institutionalisation that leads to the weakening of influential networks", depends on the tendencies of national politics from now on.

The writer is with the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. This article has been excerpted from a research paper carried out under the faculty's Thailand Democracy Watch project.

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