Publication Code: Y93C

Democracy Without Equity?: The Institutions and Political Consequences of Bangkok-based Development, Synthesis Report
Volume III

by Scott R. Christensen

Table of Contents

There is very little correlation in Thailand between the existence of electoral democracy and the improvement of equity in the economy. The income distribution gap has both widened and narrowed slightly throughout the transition to democracy, dating from 1973. Equity problems are more the result of what elected governments have left undone, rather than what they have done, thereby leading to the following concern: to what extent can a more participatory political system, institutionalized in the parliamentary form of government, be used as a vehicle to create more equity in the economy?

In this regard the Thai political system has performed well for specific interest groups and voters, but it has not yielded policies which are effective for addressing the collective needs of a rapidly industrializing society. It is argued that this style of governance is the result of an extended period of "Bangkok-based development," which has had the following institutional features and consequences:

• Over the past three decades, adjustments to the institutions of national decision making have strengthened the central government's control over the provinces and boosted the role of urban industrialists in the policy-making process. While gradually improving the state's policy management capacities, these adjustments have had pernicious distributional consequences as well. They have centered most of the industrial growth in and around Bangkok; served the political interests of the capital's bureaucratic elite; and assigned urban industrialists a privileged status in policymaking.
• The consequences of this pattern of development have shaped electoral strategies of the political parties in the post-1973 period. The equity imbalances have encouraged politicians -- in particular those from the provinces -- to turn the policymaking process into a distributive game, whereby public policy becomes the means to redistribute resources from Bangkok back to the provinces at the expense of the taxpayer. In part because political power is so heavily concentrated in the offices of the central bureaucracy in Bangkok, the politicians have great incentives to turn this process into as much of a zero-sum game as possible. This distributive game creates problems of collective action among the political parties, and it limits the extent that the electoral process can be used to address the collective interests of the rural voting majority.

The distributive game also renders parliamentary democracy in Thailand rather inconsistent and fragile. Elected governments must answer to the two primary constituencies that sweep them to power -- the business elites of Bangkok, and the rural voting majority. Members of these two groups desire vastly different outputs from elected governments. A government which is consumed with allocating resources to the countryside loses the affection of urban business; but a government which is only "pro-business" is bound to get elected out of office by the rural majority with little delay. The different demands of these groups creates dilemmas for the politicians, who in turn resort to the distributive game for immediately, ad hoc solutions.

In the closing section the paper suggests that a combination of industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratic reforms which would promote more coherent policies would change the incentives which face Thailand's politicians. In the meantime the parties will be constrained by the need to distribute resources to the country side while conducting public policy in a manner which would retain the support of the Bangkok business constituency.

December 1993