Building Programmatic Linkages in the Periphery: The Case of the TRT Party in Thailand

• Author: Illan Nam,Viengrat Nethipo
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211039954
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211039954

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211039954

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Article

Building Programmatic

Linkages in the Periphery:

The Case of the TRT

Party in Thailand

Illan Nam

Colgate University

Viengrat Nethipo

Chulalongkorn University

Abstract

Did the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party of Thailand, the first party in the country’s

history to gain parliamentary dominance in 2001, represent a departure from

traditional clientelistic Thai parties or was it old wine in a new bottle? This article

argues that the TRT represented a new hybrid party that successfully established

programmatic linkages in rural parts of the country by systematizing its use of

informal social networks in local communities. By routinizing recruitment, training,

and evaluation of its parliamentary candidates and their vote-canvassing networks,

the TRT imparted midlevel politicians with the incentives and ability to promote

the party’s policy agenda to rural voters and to cultivate new policy-oriented

linkages alongside traditional clientelistic ones. By identifying specific organizational

mechanisms by which the TRT combined programmatic and clientelistic linkages

with rural voters, this study contributes to literature that examines hybrid party

strategies as well as informal party organization.

Keywords

party organization, programmatic linkages, clientelism, informal organization,

populism, polarization, Thailand

Corresponding Author:

Illan Nam, Colgate University, 135 Persson Hall, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY, 13346, USA.

Email: inam@colgate.edu

1039954PASXXX10.1177/00323292211039954Politics & SocietyNam and Nethipo

research-article2021

2022, Vol. 50(3) 413–454

The party is like a school that gives direction to politicians.

—TRT MP, Lamphun, Constituency 1

We are mediators between the party and voters. This is our job.

—TRT MP, Ubon Ratchathani, Constituency 2

Policy is more fun. It gives you more material to offer voters. Before, I had nothing to

offer voters so politics was not fun. But offering policy makes it fun to talk to voters. I

have good equipment to reach people.

—TRT MP, Ubon Ratchathani, Constituency 7

In 2001, the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party became the first party in Thailand’s electoral

history to win a resounding electoral victory, garnering a majority of legislative seats

in the House and reordering the country’s fluid party system, which long had been

plagued by high electoral volatility and fragile parties.1 Following the TRT’s victory,

the average number of national parties fell dramatically, from 7.2 to 3.8, such that

Thailand appeared to be settling into a stable “one-and-a-half party system” dominated

by the TRT and its main opponent, the Democrat Party.2 Most vividly, as comparisons

of the 1995, 2001, and 2005 electoral maps in Figures 1, 2, and 3 show, distinctive

cleavages emerged, as voters sorted themselves along sharply drawn regional lines,

with the TRT establishing its stronghold in the North and Northeast regions and the

Democrat Party entrenching itself in the South.

Ironically, despite the TRT’s success in consolidating an unruly party system, by

2006, a welter of critical voices condemning the party, and more pointedly, its

leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, had emerged.3 Accusing Thaksin of authoritarian ten-

dencies as well as antimonarchism, a powerful opposition movement succeeded in

paving the way for a return to military rule in late 2006, subsequently dissolving the

TRT and banning its top executives from running in elections for five years.4 In the

following decade, two new constitutions, written under the aegis of the military

regime, revised electoral rules so as to weaken the TRT. But despite this and the

junta government’s sustained harassment of the TRT’s successor parties—the

People’s Power Party (PPP) and the Pheu Thai Party (PT)—those parties garnered

impressive victories in the 2007 and 2011 elections, with the PPP winning 233 out

of 480 seats in 2007 and the PT winning 265 out of 500 seats in 2011.5 Indeed, as

Figures 1–3 illustrate, the TRT’s victory reordered the electoral map in 2001 and

established a pattern that persisted throughout the next fifteen years, a pattern man-

ifest not only in the election results of 2011 but also of 2019, as Figures 4 and 5

demonstrate.6 Even after the military’s second and more draconian intervention in

2014, the TRT through its successor parties (the PPP and PT) displayed significant

strength in its regional strongholds in the March 2019 election, in which the PT

garnered 137 out of the 250 constituency seats that it contested.7 Accordingly, the

414 Politics & Society 50(3)

PT recorded a victory rate of 54.8 percent, largely in line with the 54.4 percent rate

it attained in the 2011 race. Yet, these figures by themselves do not illuminate sev-

eral other dimensions of the PT’s performance that merit consideration. On one

hand, in 2019, the party did not report a vote share in any constituency above 50

Figure 1. Election results by province, 1995. (Office of the Election Commission of Thailand.)

415

Nam and Nethipo