The discourse of vote buying and political reform in Thailand

Political reform movements have grown up as part of democratic transition in many societies. Liberal political reformers typically seek to change legal and institutional mechanisms in order to "clean up" the irrationality and corruption of the regime. This essay uses the Thai case to critically examine these issues by interrogating the central role that the discourse of vote buying plays not just in Thai politics, but in the project of political reform itself. Indeed, in the 1990s vote buying turned from being one of many campaign tactics into the guiding metaphor of the "political disease" not simply of elections, but of Thai society in general. Rather than seeing vote buying as a coherent "thing," the essay will examine how this varied practice of electoral fraud has been reduced into a key category of Thai politics - "Vote-Buying." By demonstrating how vote buying is tied to its opposite - bourgeois democracy - one can better examine how both vote buying and democracy are co-produced in various networks of power relations. The essay examines key discourses to show how the concepts of law, "good and able leaders," gangsters, the middle class, civil society, and village life are central in defining both vote buying and democracy in popular media and thus the popular imagination. Vote buying is produced in specific relations between political and economic power, urban and rural power, and official and unofficial power; to fight it one needs to challenge the dynamics of these relations.