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Working Paper Series Michael H. Nelson Electoral Rules Concerning the House of Representatives in the 2007 Thai Constitution Working Paper Series No. 104 December 2009 The Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) of the City University of Hong Kong publishes SEARC Working Papers Series electronically ©Copyright is held by the author or authors each Working Paper. SEARC Working Papers cannot be republished, reprinted, or reproduced in any format with- out the permission of the papers author or authors. Note: The views expressed in each paper are those of the author or authors of the paper. They do not represent the views of the Southeast Asia Research Centre, its Management Commit- tee, or the City University of Hong Kong. Southeast Asia Research Centre Management Committee Professor William Case, Director Dr Catherine Chiu Dr Nicholas Thomas Dr Bill Taylor Editor of the SEARC Working Paper Series Ms Jennifer Eagleton Southeast Asia Research Centre The City University of Hong Kong 83 Tat Chee Avenue Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR Tel: (852 3442 6106 Fax: (852) 3442 0103 http://www.cityu.edi.hk/searc ELECTORAL RULES CONCERNING THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN THE 2007 THAI CONSTITUTION1 Michael H. Nelson Visiting scholar, Faculty of Political Science Chulalongkorn University Introduction Since this paper is part of a panel on “Government and Political Legitimacy,” let me begin with a statement Wicha Mahakhun 2 made in the 11th meeting of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) on 22 February 2007. He said, “I want us to abolish the situation in which only two groups exercise power, namely, first, those who have great expertise in conducting elections and, second, those who use their weapons to seize political power. If we can create politics that do not only have these two groups, then our constitution will be sustainable.”3 One does not need to attach too much significance to a statement made at a meeting but still wonder why gaining power through electoral expertise should be illegitimate in a democracy, a system of government that is based on elections. Wicha’s background assumption probably was that “electocrats” (as critics call politicians in Thailand) win elections solely by buying votes. Moreover, he did not mention the group he himself belonged to—the ammart – that in past decades (including after the coup of 19 September 2006) had only been too willing to help those with the guns and tanks to seize power from those who relied on elections by the people, thereby encouraging the military to undertake coups. 1 Paper presented at the KPI Congress XI, “Conflict, Legitimacy and Government Reform: Equitable Allocation of Resources in Thai Society, November 5-7, 2009, United Nations Conference Centre, Ra- jadamnoen Avenue, Bangkok; Group 1: “Government and Political Legitimacy”. This paper presents some preliminary information from an ongoing research project conducted for the King Prajadhipok’s Institute. Its title is “The National Assembly of Thailand: Constructing a Representative Institution (1997-2008).” The author is currently in the process of data collection. For verified information, please consult the final report. 2 Wicha Mahakhun is a former judge who now serves on the National Anti-Corruption Commission. 3 รายงานการประชุมคณะกรรมาธิการยกรางรฐธรรมนั ูญ สภารางรัฐธรรมนูญ ครั้งที่ ๑๑ วนพฤหั ัสบดีท ี่ ๒๒ กุมภาพนธั ๒๕๕๐, p. 56. Southeast Asia Research Centre Working Paper Series, No. 104, 2009 1 Thus, we need to expand Wicha’s two-group model. In fact, recent Thai politics have been shaped by the respective strength of five groups and political models, including their interactions. In addition, the normative appeal of the world model of democracy has served as an intervening variable and source of encouragement during this period. These five groups and models are: (1) The monarchy (including the Privy Council and their respective informal networks) as Thailand’s former socio-political apex (until 1932) with its renewed claim (since the early 1950s) of being the country’s enlightened as well as enlightening “soul of the nation”. (2) The military as a self-interested and closed organization that also poses as the self-appointed guardian of national unity and survival, protector of the monarchy, and final arbiter about who is allowed to govern the country. (3) The informal socio-political networks (categorized as ammart) of leading bureaucrats, technocrats, and academics involved in politics and administration, who claim to possess superior knowledge as well as morality and thus consider themselves to have special rights in guiding the country’s social, political, and economic directions (this group is Thailand’s version of Plato’s “true navigators”). (4) The politicians with their vast informal and exclusionary networks at the provincial, regional, and national levels (including their factions and political parties), who claim that they represent the people, and that constitutionally produced electoral success provides them with the democratic legitimacy to govern the country and dominate the other groups and models in terms of policy making. (5) Finally, there are the people themselves, who are the supposed sovereign of the democratic political system. Their involvement in politics (as citizens, voters, party members, target group of policies, civil society groups, protestors, and social movements) has had a rather mixed record, but it has recently been put into focus by a substantial increase in politicization Southeast Asia Research Centre Working Paper Series, No. 104, 2009 2 (especially since about 2000) as well as by both the PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy) and the UDD (United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship). The formal structures found in the Thai constitution result from contention between these forces, which interact and partly overlap, based largely on differing definitions of what the problems of Thai politics were, and constitutional solutions devised in other countries. With the overthrow of the popularly elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006 – merely a months before scheduled fresh elections – the second (military) and the third (ammart) group joined hands in order to impose new rules of the game on the fourth group (the politicians), who was deliberately excluded from the constitution-drafting process. As CDC member Krirkkiat Phipatseritham4 self-confidently stated, “We are the ones who draft the rules. They [the politicians] are those who play [politics]. We do not draft the rules to please those who play [politics]. We draft the rules according to what should be.”5 To this purpose, a constitution-drafting assembly (CDA) and a constitution-drafting committee (CDC) were established, the latter filled with members of Bangkok’s well-connected legal, bureaucratic, and academic establishment.6 4 Krirkkiat Phipatseritham is a retired civil servant. He used to be a full professor in economics at Thammasat University, and a member of the first post-1997 National Counter Corruption Commission. He already participated in constitution drafting exercises in 1991 (after the NPKC coup), and 1997. This indicates how well connected Krirkkiat has been in the Bangkok establishment, and how senior he is. 5 รายงานการประชุมคณะกรรมาธิการยกรางรฐธรรมนั ูญ สภารางรัฐธรรมนูญ ครั้งที่ ๒๖ วนอั ังคารท ี่ ๑๐ เมษายน ๒๕๕๐, p. 6. Note the “them and us,” “friend and foe,” “black and white” construction, including the implication that the people categorized as “us” somehow possessed superior knowledge of what “should” be (the constitutionally true normative political standpoint), while “them” apparently failed to realize the truth of the “true navigators’” position. One might also ask what it was that gave Krirkkiat this elevated sense of impor- tance and non-democratic decision-making power over politicians. In this respect, one might have to refer to the worldview of a Thai bureaucrat of his generation, which is probably firmly rooted in the “bureaucratic polity” (Riggs) of old. 6 The interim constitution, drafted mainly by a long-standing key member of the ammart (Meechai Ruchuphan), envisaged a rather complicated process for determining who should sit on the CDC. Nev- ertheless, the outcome was rather predictable. As Ploy Suebvises noted, “Fifteen of the 35 members were high-level legal bureaucrats and judges, supplemented by four lecturers of law. In addition, there were four more bureaucrats and four more lecturers from a variety of fields. There was only one politi- cal scientist among these academics. The remaining members comprised one technocrat, one journalist, and one member of the private sector, one soldier, and a women’s rights activist (only three women were selected to serve on the CDC)” (Ploy Suebvises (forthcoming), “The Making of the 2007 Thai Constitution: Redesigning the Election System”, NIDA Case Study Journal. Southeast Asia Research Centre Working Paper Series, No. 104, 2009 3 Obviously, having one or two social groupings unilaterally impose rules on a third group (and implicitly on the people, that is the fifth group), which will then have to act the rules out, poses the core problem of acceptance by that latter group. This structural situation is not new. More than 25 years ago, Chai-anan Samudavanija wrote, “The tensions evident since 1973 are the result of a conflict between two alternative bases of legitimacy: one emanating from traditional hierarchical traditions, the other based on popular sovereignty.”7 Today, Thailand faces much the same problem. Political scientist Panitan Wattanayakorn
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