Publication Code: Y93E

Beyond Patronage: Tasks for the Thai State

by Scott R. Christensen and Ammar Siamwalla

Table of Contents

Thailand is experiencing a rapid shift from an administrative-centered government to an interest-group centered government. Elected politicians and interest groups from nearly all quarters of society have penetrated the State and are increasingly shaping the goods and services it provides. Though just at the same time that the State's autonomy from society has declined, the State has been failing to provide the goods and services that are necessary for managing the complexities of an industrial and increasingly urbanized society.

The paper offers three sets of arguments in support of this claim:

• The era of administrative-centered government (roughly 1932-1973) resulted in the development of rules and procedures in the conduct of public policy that have become increasingly inadequate -- and in some cases inimical -- to the policy requirements of a complex industrial society.
• As industrialization proceeds, many of the services and regulatory functions the State will need to perform may not be expressed in the form of demands by votes and interest groups. Interest group and voter participation is not a sufficient condition for an effective, functioning government. The provision of these services thus depends on the capacities and foresight of politicians and civil servants.
• Many of the services the State needs to provide are heavily knowledge-intensive and require great administrative and technological agility. But the old practices associated with administrative-centered government, whereby officials devise policies and allocate patronage in a top-down fashion, are increasingly unsuitable for governing a complex industrial society.

As industrialization and urbanization run rampant, the old institutions and ways of conducting public policy will no longer do if Thailand is to remain competitive globally while also correcting the externalities that arise along the way and distributing the gains of economic growth more equitably among all sectors of the population. While the State does not always act upon the complexity of modern society in a coherent or effective fashion, it is acted upon quite frequently by the numerous votes and interest groups that have emerged as a result of decades of sustained economic growth.

While we offer no policy prescriptions per se, we stress throughout the discussion that the quality of government matters, and it will matter all the more as the country continues its structural shift away from an agrarian economic and social base. In the closing section we devise four scenarios about future economic and political trends. In doing so we make four assumptions about the future, namely:

• Urbanization will increase rapidly, not only in Bangkok, but also in numerous provincial cities.
• In the urban areas there will arise a much larger larger middle class which will not be dependent on the State for either its livelihood or security.
• The majority of the labor force will no longer be employed in agriculture, and the ranks of urban factory laborers will well. The urban industrial labor force will become unionized and its organization will grow in strength.
• Parliamentary institutions will remain the norm.

On the basis of these assumptions we construct four scenarios which would result under alternative sets of economic and social conditions. In all four cases, outcomes depend on the political roles of the urban interest groups (industrialists, middle classes, and labor) and the military and the reactions of these groups to changing economic and social conditions. The scenarios also depend on the extent of civil service restructuring, a factor which, in our view, is one of the chief variables which could improve the quality of government services and the ability of the State to act coherently upon the economic and political challenges which could arise over the coming decades.

December 1993