Introduction

It will be useful to begin looking at the Thai party system by referring to a classic work on Thai politics – that of Fred Riggs. If we think of the “instrumentalities of popular control” as political parties, one is struck by the validity of Riggs’s observation that politics is largely “a struggle for power as an end in itself among competing cliques and factions.” Since the birth of its parties in 1932, Thailand’s party system has been devoid of real programmatic differences. Instead, the system has largely been consumed by elites running empty political shells in the pursuit of spoils for their factions. Only in recent years has the party system begun to exhibit programmatic differences among its main contenders. Overall, however, the historical tendency of Thailand’s party system has been one of institutional fecklessness and ideological vacuousness.

Thailand’s party system is notorious for its low level of institutionalization. Underscoring this assessment, James Ockey writes: “There is widespread agreement that parties are too weak while their factions are too strong . . . The importance of this consensus in the literature cannot be overstated.” Using three of the components of Mainwaring and Scully’s definition of party system institutionalization – stability in the rules and nature of interparty competition, stable roots in society, and organizational autonomy and strength – it is clear that on all these attributes the Thai party system scores low.