Social Capital Theory

Social capital theorists argue that “[s]ocial capital is an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals.”⁶

The connections that people develop with relatives, friends, coworkers, and fellow citizens comprise informal networks, which can produce private and public goods. What Tocqueville called the “art of association” is seen as a form of capital because its norms of trust and reciprocity can be circulated and accumulated, enabling the pursuit of mutual goals.⁷ Social networks lubricate economic and political life. Conversely, according to the social capital thesis, when a society lacks norms of trust and reciprocity, the health of its economic and political institutions also suffers.

While some criticize the social capital research agenda as “part of the broader conquest of the social sciences by economics,” others see it as a powerful conceptual response to economistic, rational choice understandings of politics and society.⁸

Robert Putnam's and Francis Fukuyama's research “brings society back in” to the frameworks that social scientists use to understand political action and economic prosperity. Rather than seeing social and cultural factors as peripheral to political and economic activity, social capital theory holds that institutions and laws are embedded in a social context.⁹

Along with the idea of civil society, social capital became influential in the 1990s as a way to explain the transitions of postcommunist states to liberal capitalist democracies. It has also been used to explain the erosion of political participation in advanced industrial societies: understanding the decline of social capital, Putnam argues, helps us explain the atrophy of American community more generally. In both cases, having the right formal modern institutions and legal frameworks is not enough; the informal relations of both civil society and traditional organizations are also crucial factors. Good neighborliness thus is seen as good politics.¹⁰

This positive expression of the social capital thesis has generated quite a debate, since others have shown how social capital can lead to unsocial capital, that is, “public bads” as well as “public goods.”¹¹

Fukuyama points out that “Many groups achieve internal cohesion at the expense of outsiders”;¹² organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the Mafia are often cited as prime examples.¹³ Victor Pérez-Diaz challenges the social capital thesis, arguing that “the assumption of social capital's benign effects on liberal societies should be drastically qualified”¹⁴ by differentiating social capital not just quantitatively (that is, more or less), but also qualitatively (that is, civil and uncivil). Fukuyama likewise suggests that we need to think not just of a group's “radius of trust,” but also its “radius of distrust.”¹⁵ More recently, Putnam has reminded us, again using the example of the KKK, that “social capital is not automatically conducive to democratic governance.”¹⁶

Putnam addresses these points in Bowling Alone, but his short chapter on the “dark side” is more concerned with the relation of liberty and equality to social capital than with the issue of whether social capital is truly a normative “good.”¹⁷

He divides social capital into two categories: “bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves.”¹⁸ Bonding social capital is inward-looking and builds strong community identities, while bridging social capital is outward-looking and builds networks of networks. Bonding and bridging networks may come into conflict in what Putnam calls “fraternity at war with itself.”¹⁹

Hence Putnam argues that it is not an issue of choosing civil over uncivil social capital, but a question of maintaining the proper balance between both necessary forms of social capital. Still, criticisms persist: using data from German voluntary organizations, Sonja Zmerli argues that bridging social capital has positive effects for democracy, while bonding does not.²⁰

Thus social capital runs into many of the same problems as “community,” “civil society,” and “new social movements”: these concepts are not just descriptive, but also normative. Social capital too is not just an objective measure of political participation; it normatively prescribes morally good things. The KKK and the Mafia are cited so often as the exception because they prove the rule of social capital's necessity in a democratic polity. Putnam stresses that “it is important to ask how the positive consequences of social capital—mutual support, cooperation, trust, and institutional effectiveness—can be maximized and the negative manifestations—sectarianism, ethnocentrism, corruption—minimized.”²¹

The aim of social capital theory is to progressively expand the network of networks and their shared norms to eventually include everyone. In this essay, I address the normative problem of social capital by expanding both the quantitative argument (more is better, less is worse) and the qualitative argument (civil versus uncivil capital). But rather than, like Putnam, separating “mutual support” from “corruption,” or differentiating between bonding and bridging social capital, I draw attention to the productive tension between social capital and corruption. Furthermore, instead of pursuing the possibility of an all-inclusive community, I follow Bourdieu in examining how communities are formed by drawing boundaries and making social distinctions.²² The distinction between insiders and outsiders is thus not limited to the usual heinous examples or to bonding social capital. As William Connolly points out, “Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.”²³ Thus social networks not only include; they necessarily exclude; a group's identity is determined by its limits.²⁴ Analogously, the negative consequences of social capital—that is, corruption—are inseparable from its benefits because both social capital and corruption become meaningful only when they are distinguished from each other.²⁵ Thus I use Bourdieu's concept of social capital to expand the theory's focus on the relations of people to include the relationality of concepts. The curious politics of political reform and vote buying in Thailand illuminates the main conceptual issue of social capital theory—the proper relation of state to society—in a more nuanced way.

Constitutionalism and Good Governance in Thailand

The 2001 general election in Thailand was important not just for choosing a new government. It also ushered in a raft of new processes and procedures that dramatically reshaped both institutions and civil society in Thailand. These rules were not imposed from above (as in the past), but were the result of years of campaigning by political and social groups, which resulted in a new “People's Constitution” in 1997. It was the end of a long process.

Through a fortuitous combination of the bonding social capital of ethnic Chinese business and the bridging social capital of ethnic Thai public officials, the country had experienced four decades of uninterrupted economic expansion, with an average annual GDP growth rate of over 10 percent, and an increase in per capita GDP from US $100 in 1961 to $2,750 in 1995.²⁶

At the same time, Thailand's political institutions were gradually becoming more democratic, moving from the semidemocracy of an unelected prime minister over an elected parliament in the early 1980s, to the more full democracy of an elected prime minister in 1988. But in 1991, the Thai military seized power in its first successful coup in fourteen years. Political unrest erupted in May 1992 when the coup leader tried to legitimate and extend his rule by becoming an unelected prime minister. After a brutal military crackdown on democratic mass demonstrations, the army leader was forced to step down in favor of Anand Panyarachun, a caretaker prime minister, who organized elections that put an elected government back in power in September 1992.²⁷

Although democracy in Thailand was back on track, a loose group of elites, commonly known as the “Political Reform Movement,” was not satisfied. To the reformists, having an elected government was not enough. There were still structural problems in the Thai body politic, most notably the military-sponsored constitution that remained in force even after the coup-makers had been ousted from power. As a key reformer wrote in 2001, “It came as no surprise that one popular demand in May 1992 was the complete revision of the constitution. The Events of May set off a political reform process, which is still unfolding to date.”²⁸

After 1992 an alliance of business leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, and public intellectuals started discussing how to reform Thai politics through rewriting the constitution. This alliance of conservative, liberal, and progressive activists built upon a tradition democratic activism that went back to the 1970s. Members of the group had formed the Campaign for Popular Democracy to protest the 1991 coup. In 1992 they joined PollWatch, a monitoring organization that fought electoral corruption. Through PollWatch, reformers spread civil society activity outside the metropolitan center to include activists in provincial towns. Many of PollWatch's members pressured the government to institute political reforms, and the government appointed PollWatch activists to the Democratic Development Committee (DDC) in 1994, which was charged with studying possible reforms to the political system. The DDC included voices from the provincial middle class as well as elites from the center.²⁹

The DDC facilitated the election in 1996 of the Constitution Drafting Assembly, which drafted the 16th Thai Constitution, presented to Parliament for approval in 1997. According to this dominant narrative of political reform, the rise of the political reform movement is a lesson in the successful circulation and accumulation of social capital; it achieved an important mutual goal—a constitution that better reflected the wishes of the people.

While political problems were being solved, Thailand was engulfed in economic problems. Due to internal mismanagement, corruption, and external pressures, in July 1997 the Thai economy abruptly slipped into a world-class depression.³⁰

The resulting East Asian economic crisis spurred the Thai government to request a $17.4 billion rescue package, which they received, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While the crisis sparked anti-Chinese riots and anti-Western demonstrations elsewhere in Asia, in Thailand it fueled the ongoing critical self-examination of social and political institutions. Although it was the result of various factors, many blamed the crisis on inept and corrupt politicians. Reformers thus used it as an opportunity to institute far-reaching political changes; against the opposition of politicians and bureaucrats, they were able to push Parliament to approve the 16th Constitution of Thailand. The new rules and institutions created by this constitution were first tested in the general election of January 2001.

The constitution and the election thus are intimately related in the sense that both activists and analysts stated that the People's Constitution was written to fight vote buying. Former Election Commissioner and key democratic activist Gothom Arya explains, “One of the objectives of the present political reform is to stem vote buying. Many provisions of the constitution were drafted having this problem in mind.”³¹

Thailand's foremost expert on electoral politics, Sombat Chantornvong, agrees: “The drafters of the new constitution appeared to be convinced that they had solved the problems of legitimacy and efficiency that had long destabilized the Thai political system. The practice of vote buying by competing politicians was the source of many of these evils.”³²

Vote buying is not merely a political issue; the logic of corruption in Thailand links political and economic interests. Gangsters seek to buy their way into office to take advantage of the country's riches. As ministers, they warp the system to direct state resources to friends and relatives, while protecting their own illegal businesses.³³

Prime Minister Banharn Silapa-acha (1995–96), the provincial gravel merchant who enriched himself on state contracts, famously declared in 1992 that he could not afford to be out of government very long. For such politicians, business and politics are complementary: they use proceeds from illegal business to buy votes to get into power, then use that power to expand and protect their ventures.³⁴ As Ruth McVey explains, “Money has thus come to dominate politics at all levels: one must have money to run, and one must make money from office too.”³⁵

To change this behavior, reformers revised the legal framework of the constitution to bring about institutional change. They sought to encourage not just clean politics, but also “good governance”—a term that often refers to a neoliberal ordering of the global political economy. Starting in 1996, the IMF used the term to describe (and prescribe) economic and political reform projects tied to structural adjustments.³⁶

On the face of it, good governance is more about management than law, but it uses legal rules to manage economic life. In a broader sense, good governance is a product of a rational view of modern society that stresses the role of formal institutions, the rule of law, and transparent administration. It is a legalistic system of autonomous, objective, and universally applied standards.³⁷

The concept of good governance is not just the ideology of transnational neoliberal institutions. It also became popular in pre-1997 Bangkok when the three top opinion makers of Thai public life—Anand Panyarachun, Prawase Wasi, and Thirayuth Boonmi—each promoted it.³⁸

Good governance also received important institutional cachet when it was chosen as the topic of the annual conference of Thailand's leading think tank in 1998 and became official government policy in 1999.³⁹

According to the logic of good governance, the rational impartiality and universality of law can constrain the irrational bias of politicians. Reform is instituted through constitutional politics. The title of a 1994 best-selling book that set the agenda for the 1997 constitution is telling: Constitutionalism: The Solution for Thailand.⁴⁰

To squelch corruption and avert catastrophe, reformers changed the rules of the political game by means of a twofold constitutional solution: (1) they severed the link between elections and government ministries, and (2) they changed election procedures to restrict vote buying.

Under previous constitutions, the Senate was not elected, but appointed by the sitting government. It was an enclave of the military-bureaucracy that was suspicious of the electoral politics of parliamentary democracy. The House of Representatives was elected from multiple-member constituencies. The 1997 constitution reformed the National Assembly into three kinds of elected representatives: senators, constituency MPs, and party list MPs. The Senate was directly elected from each province. It was meant to be not just an upper house for legislative scrutiny, but also a separate apolitical body. As Sombat explains, “The charter writers wanted the new senate to be completely free from politics.”⁴¹

Senators have to be “pure”: candidates cannot be members of political parties, and there were severe restrictions on election campaigning.⁴²

The House of Representatives was divided into 400 constituency MPs and 100 party list MPs. Ministers could not be constituency MPs. Hence they either had to be elected from the party list, or they had to resign their seats and cover election costs for their vacated seat.⁴³

Not allowing constituency MPs to become ministers was seen as a clever way of cutting the link between vote buying politicians and lucrative ministries. The party list ballots would encourage voters to think of politics in terms of parties and policy rather than personalities and vote buying. The constitution also made voting a duty for all Thai citizens; the hope was that expanded electoral participation would make vote buying too expensive.⁴⁴ Beyond the usual restrictions that disqualify convicts, the insane, the corrupt, and the bankrupt, candidates for office now had to possess at least a bachelor's degree and not be drug addicts.⁴⁵

To enforce these new rules, the constitution created an independent organization, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT), to run the elections instead of the Ministry of Interior. The remit of the ECT as an independent nonpartisan organization was to run “clean and fair” elections by “sever[ing] the crucial ties that exist between politicians and the civil servants responsible for administering elections.”⁴⁶

Most importantly, the ECT had teeth: it was empowered to investigate and disqualify candidates for election fraud and to call for rerun elections when there were irregularities.

From the perspective of the reformers, representing the dominant discourse of political reform, the new electoral system was a success. For the first time in a generation, vote buying was down in the January 2001 general election. As a prominent election-monitoring non-governmental organization (NGO) declared, “[M]oney and intimidation no longer produced the desirable results.”⁴⁷

Because the election was organized by a neutral organization—the ECT—for the first time in history some candidates were disqualified. The voting turnout was also strong at 69.9 percent. The reforms crafted to encourage party voting rather than personality voting were reasonably successful, raising the quality of votes as well. According to a survey by the ECT, for constituency MPs 41 percent of the electorate voted on the basis of parties and platforms. On the party list ballot, 59 percent chose according to party and platform. Indeed, party membership was up nationwide: Thaksin Shinawatra's Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party recruited over 11 million party members, roughly one quarter of the entire electorate.⁴⁸

The TRT Party nearly won a majority in the House of Representatives, and much of its support came from rural voters choosing the party on the basis of its platform, which stressed a redistribution of resources to the villages.⁴⁹

As it is difficult to buy votes for the party list ballot, many commentators felt that the TRT Party's success showed that it was not able to simply purchase the election. Thus the reforms encouraged parties to be more serious about writing policy platforms and made political parties more of a national institution than a cobbling together of regional warlords.

But political reformers' celebration was premature. There were also serious problems with the elections that tell much about the intimate relation of civil and uncivil capital in political reform. Although the ECT was successful in using its powers to disqualify candidates and rerun elections, this quickly became a farce as it took five months to finish the Senate elections, producing the longest election process in world history. The limits on campaigning and the ban on political party membership both were twisted by prominent politicians to their advantage: over one third of the senators turned out to be members of well-connected political families. Rather than the intended separation of powers between House and Senate, the Senate was turned into a “politician's wives' club,” and an “assembly of clans and dynasties.”⁵⁰

Despite hopes that the new constitution would curb electoral fraud, vote buying continued in the 2001 general election. A bank survey noted that during the campaign, the flow of cash increased to $500 million, which was $100 million more than for the 1996 election.⁵¹

While political reformers hailed the success of party voting, canvassers used this modernizing trend to buy votes in different ways. In addition to paying voters directly for their support, canvassers bought voters wholesale by recruiting them as party members. This turns the ideology of grassroots political parties on its head: party members do not pay membership fees to finance the local and national branches of a democratic party. On the contrary, the party pays them. The TRT Party proudly noted that nationwide it had recruited 11 million new members—roughly equal to the number of votes its party list received.

Hence, the political reform movement, which structured the constitution so as to elect a more legitimate government, was only partially successful. Though less prevalent, vote buying continued in new forms; corruption quickly adapts to new rules. The relation between the positive social capital of the political reform group and the antidemocratic consequences of their activities underlines the problems in trying to divide social capital into civil and uncivil, bonding and bridging types. The groups that came together to write a new constitution carried no negative externalities. Indeed, social capitalist theorists like Putnam might have hailed this coalition as an exemplary network of civil society groups capable of enriching democracy and society through bridging social capital.

Yet, although the goal of the reformers was to effect a more participatory democratic system, their methods were quite exclusionary. The requirement that senators be apolitical and that ministers come from the party list rather than constituencies abstracts politics from popular participation in civil society, which social capital theorists promote. More generally, the results of the 2001 election showed how this campaign to use the law to sever the heinous relationship between political and economic power failed because social capital and corruption quickly adapted to the new rules. The best example is the role of political party membership—one of the standard measures of social capital.⁵²

Low membership in the kingdom's informal and nonideological parties has often been listed as one of the pathologies of Thai politics. The reforms were crafted to encourage “real political parties” with “mass membership, sophisticated administrative structure, local branches, representative leadership, ideological cohesion and concrete policy platforms.”⁵³ But as we have seen, the 2001 election showed how vote buying morphed into political party-membership buying, which one might be tempted to discount as a transient election day activity, were it not for the fact that membership and other party activities continue to thrive in postelection Thailand. This is due in large part to the government's popular rural policies.⁵⁴ Social capital formation is thus tied to new forms of corruption.

Good governance and its technical view of democracy therefore worked against the popular political participation valued by both Thai political reformers and social capital theorists. The election was a battle of networks, none easily classified as civil or uncivil, bridging or bonding social capital. While networking may be praiseworthy in principle, in this case the “People's Constitution” was not embedded in society and did not encourage democratic political participation. This is not a technical problem of fixing the constitution to either include more Thai citizens or plug the loopholes that allowed new forms of vote buying; rather, it is a theoretical question of the relationship between state and society.⁵⁵

One must examine how the circulation and accumulation of social capital by “good groups” like the Thai political reform movement has negatively affected society.

Good Leaders and the Coup de Technocrats

Although the political reformers were happy that the new constitution was able to clean up the 2001 elections, they were unhappy with the election results. Thaksin's TRT Party won a landslide victory with its old-style party structure, which cobbled together existing factions and veteran MPs from rival parties. This underlines how for the reformers, the issue was not simply the legal problem of vote buying; it was also a leadership problem. The 2001 elections did not produce the “good and able” politicians envisioned by the reformers. Although the phrase does not appear in the constitution, “good and able people-khon di mi khwamsamart” became a catch-phrase for one of the goals of constitutional reform. According to this narrative of vote buying and political reform, the constitution is not a rational-legal document setting down universal standards, but rather guidelines providing the means by which the moral problem of elections can be solved by “good people.” Thai political scientist Prudhisan Jumbala notes that the party list was not only intended to deter vote buying and strengthen the party system, but also to “encourage knowledgeable candidates who are not good at campaigning.”⁵⁶

Anand Panyarachun, the diplomat-turned-business-executive who became prime minister at the invitation of the junta in 1991, is the poster boy of the good and able leader in this conservative discourse of political reform. Anand, who became caretaker PM again in 1992 after the democratic uprising, was never elected. But many see the Anand I and Anand II governments as the most effective and efficient in Thai memory: a business magazine declared with glee that the 1991 military putsch was a “coup de technocrats” since Anand's cabinet was the “dream-list” of the World Bank.⁵⁷

After he left office in 1992, Anand became “the unofficial leader of conservative activism,” “the pin-up hero of the good governance set,” who in 1996 was chosen to be chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee.⁵⁸

This desire for government by good and able technocrats explains many of the constitution's exclusionary articles. Electoral reforms such as the bachelor's degree requirement were meant to “encourage better-known and more respectable personalities to enter politics.”⁵⁹

The restrictions on campaigning for the Senate were supposed to encourage virtuous metropolitan technocrats who lacked the popular charm needed to woo the masses. The conservative branch of the reformist movement was motivated therefore by a “desire for technocracy” that was “only shallowly rooted in democratic principles.”⁶⁰

Thus reform was not so much about including more people in bridging networks of social capital as it was about including a certain kind of person—the virtuous technocrat. This was accomplished through both positive and negative measures. The bachelor's degree requirement, for example, excluded 95 percent of the electorate and 99 percent of the farmers—and many politicians—from contesting office.

In this discourse of vote buying and political reform, then, politicians are by definition evil and corrupt; reformist discourse often collapses the categories of gangster politician, local godfather (jao pho), and provincial MP into one stereotype.⁶¹

“Good and able people” are defined in opposition to this negative stereotype, and civil and uncivil social capital are thus intimately bound to each other. Indeed, the 2001 election was framed by election-monitoring NGOs and political commentators as a “showdown” between good and able technocrats and the vote buying politicians—between metropolitan gentlemen and the crass outsiders of the provincial nouveau riche.⁶² Using the same language as the junta did in its 1991 coup, political reformer Prawase warned of the dangers of “parliamentary dictatorship,”⁶³ and many of the exclusionary reforms echoed concerns of the military who had for decades “viewed politicians as greedy and irresponsible.”⁶⁴

Thus although reformers presented their activities as progressive and democratic in spirit, their exclusionary tactics show that theirs was not a movement that departed radically from old-style politics. Rather, they reproduced much of the antidemocratic, indeed antipolitical, discourse of the old military-bureaucratic elite. Democracy, in their view, is not achieved by a grassroots circulation and accumulation of social capital; rather, they see it as a state policy guided by national security concerns and anticommunist ideology.⁶⁵

Thaksin's post-2001 government, with its House majority, was “absolutely beyond expectations” of the Constitutional Drafting Committee that set up “constitutional mechanisms designed with multi-party governments in mind.”⁶⁶ Yet, despite its authoritarian populist character, it emerged from the political reforms.⁶⁷

The history of how vote buying became the issue of Thai politics confirms the conservativism of the political reformers who sought good and able leaders. Vote buying has been around since elections began in the 1930s and became rampant after a 1983 by-election in the province of Roi-Et. It became an issue of popular concern, though, only in the late 1980s, as Thailand shifted from being a semidemocracy—with an elected parliament led by an unelected military prime minister—to a parliamentary democracy. Political power became privatized, shifting from the military bureaucracy to provincial capitalists.⁶⁸

Suddenly, as Michael Connors argues, “Analysis of forms of vote buying became a new academic pastime and a form of journalistic scoop. Military radio constantly lampooned the capitalist politicians.”⁶⁹

Stories of vote buying were often tied to the yet more graphic headlines of gangsters and godfathers.⁷⁰ Benedict Anderson even argued that “the extraordinary spectacle, in the 1980s, of MPs being assassinated, not by communists or military dictators, but by other MPs or would-be MPs … [is] a positive omen for transition from military-bureaucratic dictatorship to parliamentary political system.”⁷¹ This is because godfather-led political assassinations demonstrated the value of a parliamentary seat and showed that the military was relatively uninvolved in parliamentary politics—at least in terms of assassinations.

Rather than moving from a bureaucratic polity to liberal corporatism,⁷²

a coalition of bureaucrats and metropolitan businesspeople used the discourse of vote buying to craft a constitution that asserted a technocratic polity that restricts representative democracy. When they deployed the aristocratic language of “good and able people,” reformers used moral argumentation to shift voters' focus away from one sort of perverse social capital to another—to the bureaucratic-business elite, from gangster politicians. Such moral arguments are evidence of a battle between two social networks: the metropolitan bureaucratic-business elite criticizes the “perverse network” of provincial capital in order to legitimize “good and able people” as a “productive network.” Thais are left with the dilemma that Putnam most fears: fraternity versus fraternity, one bonding network of social capital at war with another. But neither the “good and able people” nor the “provincial godfathers” can be categorized as simply civil or uncivil, as Pérez-Diaz might suggest.⁷³ Each has its own mix of legal and illegal activities, civil and uncivil social capital. Rather than understanding these networks as separate and coherent fraternities engaged in pitched battle, we might more profitably examine how one produces the other: indeed, much of the discourse that identifies provincial capitalists as godfathers is generated by the metropolitan bureaucratic-business elite.

The Political Culture of Followership

While conservative reformists saw Thailand's political pathology as a “leadership problem” to be solved by the constitution, liberal reformers and social activists often framed the issues as a “followership problem.” The main concern of liberal political reformers is not vote buying, but vote selling. Rather than being a technical problem for lawyers or a moral dilemma for good people, this third discourse of vote buying and political reform focuses on the political culture of clientelism. These civil society activists proposed a reform based on the social context of vote selling that was quite similar in theory to the social capital model.⁷⁴

Their understanding of reform and vote buying embodies not simply the patron/client dichotomy, but also urban/rural tensions—the virtuous urban middle-class civil society versus the perverse rural patronage networks.

The urban/rural view of politics was popularized by Anek Laothamatas in an essay that caught the attention of Thai public intellectuals in 1995 and influenced those who wrote the 16th Thai Constitution.⁷⁵

In “A Tale of Two Democracies” he questions the received wisdom that the main political division in Thailand is between the civilian middle class and military dictators (who, for example, clashed in democratic uprising of 1992). Anek argues that the guiding political division is between the urban middle class and rural patronage networks; although the rural constituencies elect governments through their control of 90 percent of the seats in Parliament, urban citizens bring down governments through their vocal criticism of public policy. While the urban middle class sees vote buying as a perversion of democracy, Anek maintains that election campaigns in rural Thailand are deeply normative activities, not simply villagers engaging in “shameful vote buying and perverted electoral behavior” to elect unqualified politicians.⁷⁶ Vote buying is part of the social network of village life; canvassers are not criminals, but local leaders who achieve influence through philanthropy. While the aim of the conservative political reform movement is to get “good and able people” into office, in rural areas the patrons who buy votes are usually seen as already having proven themselves such.⁷⁷ For example, a street food vendor and a grocery store owner are two of Chiangmai city's powerful canvassers—hardly the image of hoodlum politicians promoted by conservative reformers.⁷⁸

According to the liberal reformist discourse, then, the moralistic approach that the urban middle class uses to damn villagers is not only unhelpful, but inaccurate: villagers are “acting morally within the existing social norm.”⁷⁹

The problem, according to liberal reformers, is that the urban middle class is imposing its idealist view of democracy on a rural context that is still organized according to a hierarchical patron-client relationship. Villagers give their votes as a “favor” to candidates supported by canvassers who are local worthies. Such campaigning is not an economic transaction of money for votes; for vote sellers, the cash is largely symbolic, “confirm[ing] the social ties that link him and the local leaders.”⁸⁰ Hence vote buying in the villages is more meaningful as circulation of social capital than as circulation of economic capital. Anek's solution to the problem of vote buying is to “turn patronage-ridden villages into small towns of middle-class farmers or well-paid workers”⁸¹—in other words, to sever traditional social relationships and modernize rural dwellers into rational actors.

Thus although the village in Thailand is often portrayed as the essential site of authentic Thai life, to liberal reformers the countryside is the dystopian foil against which utopian middle-class democracy is produced. Rather than being a legal problem for the entire country, vote buying is figured as a cultural problem of rural life. The solution, according to liberal political reformers, is not just to write new laws but “to develop new values and consciousness” for an alternative political culture.⁸²

Traditional culture thus is figured in this discourse as an obstacle to be overcome for the political development of liberal democracy and the economic development of liberal capitalism. As in the “good and able people” view, the city is seen as the modernizing force: it is rational, advanced, developed, and industrial. Thus for liberal reformers, even the concept of civil society becomes a tool used by the elite state to co-opt and control grassroots politics because rural political activities often are categorized as corrupt and excluded from civil society.⁸³

Although this liberal reformist prescription is progressive in the sense that it focuses policy makers' attention on the social problems of rural life, its logic is problematic. It uses the urban/rural distinction to argue that the urban middle class needs to modernize the rural peasantry through development programs; it does not seek to generate new networks of social capital that would weave urban and rural groups together. Rather, it advocates reinvigorating a top-down rural development policy characteristic of previous military-bureaucratic regimes.⁸⁴

In this way, the argument is susceptible to many of the difficulties seen in the previous section: the social problem is located outside the metropolitan area, and the solution is not more political participation, but a hierarchical reform of peripheral populations through central planning and state control.

When one follows the liberal reformers' advice to place corruption in its social context—but this time in terms of political economy rather than political culture—the radical division between urban and rural space becomes problematic in another way. The rise of vote buying godfathers and provincial politicians is more than simply an issue of an urban/rural divide, morality, or good governance; godfathers are an important part of the Thai political economy. Indeed, according to many scholars, provincial capitalism is one of the keys to Thailand's economic success, not in isolation from the urban political economy, but as an integral part of it.⁸⁵

Due to a combination of the shift in development to an export economy and the infrastructure projects sponsored by the United States in the Vietnam War era, the provincial economy took off in the 1960s.⁸⁶ But because of a weak legal system, this frontier-style capitalism depended on close relations between local entrepreneurs and local officials. Godfathers needed to cultivate local officials to receive protection from the police as well as access to government concessions. Conversely, officials, who as part of the Thai bureaucratic system were always outsiders from another province, needed to cultivate local sources of wealth and power in the marketplace.⁸⁷ Thus provincial businessmen and villagers often see law as an instrumental exercise of arbitrary power imposed from the urban center.

This pattern of accumulation and circulation of social and economic capital is familiar: it is a key strategy of the pariah capitalism of the Chinese diaspora in Thailand who were conscious of their vulnerability as foreigners.⁸⁸

It is not surprising that many godfathers are first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants who were preyed upon by Thai government officials.⁸⁹ As Danny Unger argues, the ethnic Chinese godfathers had “the social capital necessary to thrive in business despite the absence of an effective framework of laws.” Rather than this being simply a problem, Unger concludes that “state inefficiency and corruption created a de facto laissez-faire regime for business” that aided Thailand's record of fantastic economic growth.⁹⁰ This decidedly uncivil social capital thus was crucial in generating the civil capital necessary for Thailand's economic success.⁹¹

In the 1960s and 1970s the godfathers became more powerful than local officials. When parliamentary politics became profitable, metropolitan business leaders came to godfathers in the provinces to organize local party branches because national political parties lacked local contacts.⁹²

There is an important parallel here between local branches of banks and those of political parties. Previously, metropolitan banks had also recruited the local elite—including the godfathers—to serve as compradors for Bangkok financial interests in the provinces.⁹³ With the rise of parliamentary democracy, godfathers became canvassers who pieced together local election networks, much as they had pieced together local financial networks. The urban political and economic elite thus relied on the godfathers as social capitalists to penetrate and mobilize rural areas.

In the 1980s godfathers increasingly became actors on the national scene by sponsoring MPs, at which point gangster politicians and vote buying became more prominent in the national consciousness. Hence vote buying is one consequence of the extralegal dynamic of pariah capitalism and official corruption. Contrary to the popular view of vote buying as a problem of civilian politicians in the provinces, the practice is tied into networks with both corrupt local officials and Bangkok business. The “corrupt practices” of provincial capital need to be understood in their political-economic context: they were mainly a reaction to a situation where the rule of law was arbitrary and the bureaucracy was corrupt. According to a recent World Bank report, over 40 percent of government positions in Thailand are secured through bribes.⁹⁴

This shows how neither the state institutions nor the legal framework are embedded in society in ways conducive to democratic governance. From the perspective of many in rural areas, law is an instrumental exercise of arbitrary power: “What the Thai state declares to be illegal is often understood locally as officialdom laying claim to another source of monopoly.”⁹⁵

Thus rather than being reliable arbiters of democracy, the Thai middle class is famous for its political fickleness: although it has developed productive networks of social capital, it applauded both the military coup in 1991 and the mass demonstrations in 1992. Rural areas, in contrast, have been a site of important social entrepreneurship, which has produced the most interesting democratic social movements in Thailand. Since the mid-1990s, most of the important social issues have pitted the urban middle class against rural dwellers over natural resources, a conflict that results from Thailand's industrial development since 1960, in which the city's industrialization has relied on the countryside's cheap labor, cheap food, and export revenue.⁹⁶

To combat this uneven development, farmers and rural workers started organizing themselves. Thus the rural northeast has been a key site for the accumulation and circulation of social capital in the past decade. Rural areas have been the source of Thailand's major recent democratic social movements; the Assembly of the Poor, the Northern Farmers Network, and the Small-Scale Farmers of the Northeast have all been active in building networks that represent rural views in the urban center.⁹⁷

Since the economic crisis of 1997, a localism movement has gained currency. It looks to rural wisdom rather than official urban knowledge, which it sees as foreign. Rather than considering the political culture of patron-client relations to be a problem, localists refigure village life as a social network, transforming the “community culture” of the Thai village into the solution to both political and economic crises.⁹⁸

Local knowledge is used to create alternative development strategies that do not rely on the central planning of the state. Contrary to liberal reformers' prescriptions, localists do not wish to modernize rural life and atomize society into rational individuals. Rather, community culture localism romanticizes the Thai village as a harmonious organic society guided by Buddhism as a way of fighting urban civil society. In this way, rural social movements reverse the liberal reformers' moral coding of the urban/rural relation: the village is virtuous; the city corrupt.⁹⁹ In this view, tradition is not a problem for modernity; traditional social organizations such as religious groups are crucial for the smooth functioning of modern society in ways that would be familiar to Putnam and Fukuyama.¹⁰⁰

This understanding of urban corruption and rural social capital shows how the urban/rural distinction used by liberal reformers does not work very well as the guiding principle for understanding either corruption or democracy. Indeed, the “Thai village” is the site of another conceptual battle regarding social capital. On the one hand, liberal reformers define rural life, with its patron-client relations and perverse networks of social capital as Thailand's key political problem: the villages' perverse networks of social capital warp the body politic. And while Putnam praises small-town life's traditional social organizations, liberal reformers seek to destroy them by transforming the village community into a collection of modern “rational” individuals. Community culture localism, on the other hand, champions the benefits of a productive network of local social capital, facilitated through mutual-aid projects and Buddhist religion. Still, the idyllic Thai village life held up by the localists is predicated on exclusion of ethnic Chinese traders' merchant capitalism.¹⁰¹