SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Thailand’s persistent power struggle between the populist force associated with the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the military-backed conservative bloc has fuelled extensive, but often essentialist debates on populism. This thesis critically explores the analytical value of populism in the Thai context with the support of my fieldwork conducted between 2018-2019, examining the fragile yet continued coexistence between these two opposing forces in party politics. This research primarily asks how populism has shaped the ongoing power struggle in Thailand between the conservative power bloc and its challengers. Drawing on studies of populism and political representation, this thesis contributes to theoretical debates by first developing a refined synthetic approach that conceptualises populism as a multidimensional phenomenon, with the Laclauian structural features of ‘people-centrism’ and a ‘logic of equivalence’. Then, it further proposes a framework that directs the focus of empirical analysis towards the claim-making of populist actors. Applying this analytical framework to the Thaksin era and the 2019 general election in Thailand, my thesis identifies various strands of populism: Thaksin’s electoral populism, the anti-Thaksin royalist populism, and a recent generational populism. These populist actors have competed over the use of modern party image, reformism, and nationalism as performative resources to construct and enact their claims of representing ‘the people’. The empirical analysis also makes a methodological contribution to the study of Thai populism by using campaign posters and social media content to identify populist claim-making. My main argument is that contemporary populism in Thailand arises from a ‘representational vacuum’ created by the hegemonic royalist power bloc, whose attempt to neutralise the democratic demands of the masses through a reformed parliamentary system has, since the 1990s, given unprecedented salience to party politics that it fails to dominate. As such, an antagonism, developed over the ownership of the abovementioned representational resources, has persisted and been firmly situated at the level of party politics in Thailand.