Thai Buddhism fulfils its political function of giving credence and authority to the administration of the country by symbolically reflecting the secular power structure. Historically the Thai sangha has reflected the secular political system by providing interpretations of religious doctrine which justified the patterns of social and political relations and the key policies of the government of the day. However, the sangha has also provided a direct mirror image of the state in its own internal system of administration. In the twentieth century each major shift in the Thai political system has been followed by a major state-initiated restructuring of the system of sangha administration, which has re-established a parallelism between the administrations of the secular and religious domains.

After his reforms of the state bureaucracy in the 1890s King Chulalongkorn restructured the sangha administration in 1902 to provide for a parallel centralisation of bureaucratic control over all Buddhist monks in the country. Nine years after the 1932 revolution, Chulalongkorn's centralised sangha administration was replaced by a system oisangha councils and ministries modelled on the democratic patterns of the revolutionary government. Five years after Sarit Thanarat assumed power in a military coup in 1957 and instituted his highly centralised form of military authoritarianism the democratic sangha structure established in 1941 was abolished and replaced with a recentralised administrative system which closely resembled the structure originally established by King Chulalongkorn in 1902. Since the overthrow of Sarit's successor, Thanom Kittikachorn, in October 1973, there has been a persistent and growing but as yet unsuccessful movement to re-establish the democratic system of sangha administration implemented under Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram in 1941. These major changes in the ways in which the sangha has been internally governed have been accompanied by political conflicts and agitation among monks which have indirectly reflected the political conflicts in secular Thai society.