Capital Social y Corrupción

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Social Capital and Corruption:Vote Buying and the Politicsof Reform in ThailandWilliam A. Callahan

I offera critical view of thesocial capital thesis, which frequently arguesthat more is better(andless isworse), by examiningthe ethicsof socialcapital,using PierreBourdieus understanding of networks as definedby their limits. I argue that social capital only assumesconceptual coherence when distinguishedfrom its complementaryopposite. I illustrate these theoretical points with a discussionofpolitical reform in Thailand and the 2001 general election. The election exemplifies the benefits of the circulation of social capital:

voter turnout andparty membership were up,and civil society was active. Yet democratic achievements inThailandwere intimatelytied to political corruption. In Thailand, democracy and vote buying are intimately related as examples of the productive dynamicof social capital and corruption; the civil and the uncivil often produce each other. This essay thus expands social capital theorysfocus on the relations of people by examining the relationality of concepts. One has to examine the quality of social capital and theethics of each networks inside/outside distinction.Thus rather than being a politicalsolution, socialcapital is a theoretical problem,

warranting further comparative research that examines how civil social capital interacts with the uncivil social capital of corruption,ethnocentrism, and sectarianism.

The concept of social capital has ignited much debatein the social sciences. It has been used to analyzeissues in sociology, politics, economics, public

health, urban planning, criminology, architecture, anddevelopment studies. Social capital has also excited theinterest beyond the academy: in the 1990s it became amedia sensation of interest to corporations, governments,and international organizations like the International Mon-etary Fund and the World Bank.

Social capital describes the relations that knit togethercommunities through a sharing of trust. For a society tobe orderly and prosperous, the representative institutionsand legal frameworks of the state need to be embedded ina supportive social context. Social capital theorists gener-ally argue that more is better (and less is worse) for ademocratic society. But social capital has its dark sidetightly knit groups that work to exclude as much as theyseek to include.1

In this essay I analyze how politics is embedded in socialand historical contexts of the reform politics of Thailands2001 general election. After examining the circulation andaccumulation of social capital by measuring political partymembership, voter turnout, and civil societys impact onthe election campaign, I offer a critique of social capitalresearch. Rather than assuming the coherence of social

capital as a category of political analysis, I use the Thaicase to demonstrate how social capital takes on concep-tual coherence only when distinguished from its comple-mentary opposite, for example, the corruption of organizedcrime. Thus instead of searching for the proper site ofsocial capital in Southeast Asia or for clear links betweenthe vibrancy of associational life, good governance, anddemocracy,2 I examine one of the reverse images of socialcapital: political corruption, specifically vote buying. Justas corruption shapes social capital, the study of Thailandselectoral politics shows how vote buying is intimately tiedto liberal democracy.

William A. Callahan is a professor of international politicsat the University of Manchester, England. He worked inThailand for five years as a journalist and a lecturer atRangsit University (Bangkok). His most recent book is

Contingent States: Greater China and TransnationalRelations. For sharing information and commenting onthis essay, the author thanks Gothom Arya, Michael KellyConnors, Kevin Hewison, Laddawan Tantiwittayaphitak,Naruemon Thabchumpon, Duncan McCargo, SukanyaBumroongsook, Sumalee Bumroongsook, Somchai Phatha-rathananunth, Frederic Schaffer, Teera Vorrakitpokatorn,Thavesilp Subwattana, Viengrat Netipho, and Stephen E.Welch. Special thanks to Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Per-spectives reviewers, Frederic Schaffer, and Andreas Schedler

for encouraging me to think about corruption and socialcapital in a new way.

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Corruption is usually considered injurious to the ruleof law, regardless of ideological perspective (right/left,populist/technocratic, religious/secular). Peter Bratsisobserves that [i]t is striking that so many disparate andcompeting political discourses all agree that corruption isthe problem, oftentimes the problem.3 Vote buying in

particular serves as a potent counterexample of social cap-ital in Thailand because in the 1990s it became central tothe metaphor of political disease seen to afflict not onlyelections, but also society itself.4 In other words, vote buy-ing became more than an issue of economic capital.

Rather than seeing vote buying as a singular and coher-ent variable that can explain rational actions, I examinehow corruption is the outcome of social relationships, thusshifting the focus away from quantifying social capital toexamining how it takes shape in the first place. In the firstsection of this essay I present a critical view of social cap-ital theory. In the next three sections I examine how cor-

ruption and vote buying structure our understanding ofsocial capital and democracy. In each section I look to anarrativelaw, technocracy, village lifeto move from alegalistic and institutional concept of democracy, througha moralistic view of society, to a political-cultural notionof civil society, which draws on a structural analysis of thepolitical economy. Certainly a division of political life intothese three narratives is artificial in the sense that eachentails the others to some extent. But it is important toanalyze them separately because each has an internal logicthat shows how the intimate relation between civil anduncivil social capital works in various ways. Through itsimplementation of the concepts of good governance, goodand able leaders, godfathers, the urban middle class, andcorrupt villagers, vote buying tells us much about the accu-mulation and circulation of social capital in Thailandsidentity politics.5

Liberal political reformists frame vote buying as a prob-lem of corrupt relationships: clientelism. Their solution isto transform Thai clients into citizens, who as autono-mous atomized individuals interact independently in civiland political society. When, however, one understands iden-tity not as autonomous and essential, but as the result ofsocial difference, the solution to the problem of vote buy-ing emerges not from severing relations in the name of

autonomy, but from reconsidering the form that these tiestake. This new orientation sheds light on how social net-

works in political and civil society both foster and fightcorruption. In other words, social capital is not the solu-tion to political problems: it is itself a theoretical problem.

Social Capital Theory

Social capital theorists argue that [s]ocial capital is aninstantiated informal norm that promotes cooperationbetween two or more individuals.6 The connections thatpeople develop with relatives, friends, coworkers, and fel-

low citizens comprise informal networks, which can pro-duce private and public goods. What Tocqueville calledthe art of association is seen as a form of capital becauseits norms of trust and reciprocity can be circulated andaccumulated, enabling the pursuit of mutual goals.7 Socialnetworks lubricate economic and political life. Con-versely, according to the social capital thesis, when a soci-ety lacks norms of trust and reciprocity, the health of itseconomic and political institutions also suffers.

While some criticize the social capital research agendaas part of the broader conquest of the social sciences by

economics, others see it as a powerful conceptual responseto economistic, rational choice understandings of politicsand society.8 Robert Putnams and Francis Fukuyamasresearch brings society back in to the frameworks thatsocial scientists use to understand political action and eco-nomic prosperity. Rather than seeing social and culturalfactors as peripheral to political and economic activity,social capital theory holds that institutions and laws areembedded in a social context.9

Along with the idea of civil society, social capital becameinfluential in the 1990s as a way to explain the transitionsof postcommunist states to liberal capitalist democracies.

Campaigning under the mango trees

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It has also been used to explain the erosion of politicalparticipation in advanced industrial societies: understand-ing the decline of social capital, Putnam argues, helps usexplain the atrophy of American community more gener-ally. In both cases, having the right formalmodern insti-tutions and legal frameworks is not enough; the informal

relations of both civil society and traditional organizationsare also crucial factors. Good neighborliness thus is seenas good politics.10

This positive expression of the social capital thesis hasgenerated quite a debate, since others have shown howsocial capital can lead to unsocial capital, that is, publicbads as well as public goods.11 Fukuyama points outthat Many groups achieve internal cohesion at the expenseof outsiders;12 organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)and the Mafia are often cited as prime examples.13 VictorPrez-Diaz challenges the social capital thesis, arguing thatthe assumption of social capitals benign effects on liberal

societies should be drastically qualified14

by differentiat-ing social capital not just quantitatively (that is, more orless), but also qualitatively (that is, civil and uncivil). Fuku-yama likewise suggests that we need to think not just of agroups radius of trust, but also its radius of distrust.15

More recently, Putnam has reminded us, again using theexample of the KKK, that social capital is not automati-cally conducive to democratic governance.16

Putnam addresses these points in Bowling Alone, buthis short chapter on the dark side is more concerned

with the relation of liberty and equality to social capitalthan with the issue of whether social capital is truly anormative good.17 He divides social capital into twocategories: bridging social capital can generate broaderidentities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capitalbolsters our narrower selves.18 Bonding social capital isinward-looking and builds strong community identities,

while bridging social capital is outward-looking and buildsnetworks of networks. Bonding and bridging networksmay come into conflict in what Putnam calls fraternity at

war with itself.19

Hence Putnam argues that it is not an issue of choosingcivil over uncivil social capital, but a question of main-taining the proper balance between both necessary formsof social capital. Still, criticisms persist: using data from

German voluntary organizations, Sonja Zmerli argues thatbridging social capital has positive effects for democracy,

while bonding does not.20

Thus social capital runs into many of the same prob-lems as community, civil society, and new social move-ments: these concepts are not just descriptive, but alsonormative. Social capital too is not just an objective mea-sure of political participation; it normatively prescribesmorally good things. The KKK and the Mafia are citedso often as the exception because they prove the ruleof social capitals necessity in a democratic polity. Put-nam stresses that it is important to ask how the positive

consequences of social capitalmutual support, co-operation, trust, and institutional effectivenesscan bemaximized and the negative manifestationssectarianism,ethnocentrism, corruptionminimized.21 The aim ofsocial capital theory is to progressively expand the net-

work of networks and their shared norms to eventually

include everyone. In this essay, I address the normativeproblem of social capital by expanding both the quanti-tative argument (more is better, less is worse) and thequalitative argument (civil versus uncivil capital). Butrather than, like Putnam, separating mutual supportfrom corruption, or differentiating between bondingand bridging social capital, I draw attention to the pro-ductive tension between social capital and corruption.Furthermore, instead of pursuing the possibility of anall-inclusive community, I follow Bourdieu in examininghow communities are formed by drawing boundaries andmaking social distinctions.22 The distinction between insid-

ers and outsiders is thus not limited to the usual heinousexamples or to bonding social capital. As William Con-nolly points out, Identity requires difference in order tobe, and it converts difference into otherness in order tosecure its own self-certainty.23 Thus social networks notonly include; theynecessarilyexclude; a groups identity isdetermined by its limits.24 Analogously, the negative con-sequences of social capitalthat is, corruptionare insep-arable from its benefits because both social capital andcorruption become meaningful only when they are dis-tinguished from each other.25 Thus I use Bourdieus con-cept of social capital to expand the theorys focus on therelations of people to include the relationality of con-cepts. The curious politics of political reform and votebuying in Thailand illuminates the main conceptual issueof social capital theorythe proper relation of state tosocietyin a more nuanced way.

Constitutionalism and GoodGovernance in Thailand

The 2001 general election in Thailand was important notjust for choosing a new government. It also ushered in araft of new processes and procedures that dramaticallyreshaped 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 politicaland social groups, which resulted in a new Peoples Con-stitution in 1997. It was the end of a long process.

Through a fortuitous combination of the bonding socialcapital of ethnic Chinese business and the bridging socialcapital of ethnic Thai public officials, the country hadexperienced four decades of uninterrupted economic expan-sion, with an average annual GDP growth rate of over 10percent, and an increase in per capita GDP from US $100in 1961 to $2,750 in 1995.26At the same time, Thailandspolitical institutions were gradually becoming more



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democratic, moving from the semidemocracy of anunelected prime minister over an elected parliament inthe early 1980s, to the more full democracy of an electedprime minister in 1988. But in 1991, the Thai militaryseized 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 anunelected prime minister. After a brutal military crack-down on democratic mass demonstrations, the army leader

was forced to step down in favor of Anand Panyarachun,a caretaker prime minister, who organized elections thatput an elected government back in power in September1992.27

Although democracy in Thailand was back on track, aloose group of elites, commonly known as the PoliticalReform Movement, was not satisfied. To the reformists,having an elected government was not enough. There werestill structural problems in the Thai body politic, most

notably the military-sponsored constitution that remainedin force even after the coup-makers had been ousted frompower. As a key reformer wrote in 2001, It came as nosurprise that one popular demand in May 1992 was thecomplete revision of the constitution. The Events of Mayset off a political reform process, which is still unfoldingto date.28

After 1992 an alliance of business leaders, politicians,bureaucrats, and public intellectuals started discussinghow to reform Thai politics through rewriting the consti-tution. This alliance of conservative, liberal, and progres-sive activists built upon a tradition democratic activismthat went back to the 1970s. Members of the group hadformed the Campaign for Popular Democracy to protestthe 1991 coup. In 1992 they joined PollWatch, a moni-toring organization that fought electoral corruption.Through PollWatch, reformers spread civil society activityoutside the metropolitan center to include activists in pro-vincial towns. Many of PollWatchs members pressuredthe government to institute political reforms, and the gov-ernment appointed PollWatch activists to the DemocraticDevelopment Committee (DDC) in 1994, which wascharged with studying possible reforms to the politicalsystem. The DDC included voices from the provincialmiddle class as well as elites from the center.29 The DDC

facilitated the election in 1996 of the Constitution Draft-ing Assembly, which drafted the 16th Thai Constitution,presented to Parliament for approval in 1997. Accordingto this dominant narrative of political reform, the rise ofthe political reform movement is a lesson in the successfulcirculation and accumulation of social capital; it achievedan important mutual goala constitution that betterreflected the wishes of the people.

While political problems were being solved, Thailandwas engulfed in economic problems. Due to internal mis-management, corruption, and external pressures, in July1997 the Thai economy abruptly slipped into a world-

class depression.30 The resulting East Asian economiccrisis spurred the Thai government to request a $17.4billion rescue package, which they received, from theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF). While the crisissparked anti-Chinese riots and anti-Western demonstra-tions elsewhere in Asia, in Thailand it fueled the ongoing

critical self-examination of social and political institu-tions. Although it was the result of various factors, manyblamed the crisis on inept and corrupt politicians. Reform-ers thus used it as an opportunity to institute far-reaching political changes; against the opposition ofpoliticians and bureaucrats, they were able to push Par-liament to approve the 16th Constitution of Thailand.The new rules and institutions created by this constitu-tion were first tested in the general election of January2001.

The constitution and the election thus are intimatelyrelated in the sense that both activists and analysts stated

that the Peoples Constitution was written to fight votebuying. Former Election Commissioner and key demo-cratic activist Gothom Arya explains, One of the objec-tives of the present political reform is to stem vote buying.Many provisions of the constitution were drafted havingthis problem in mind.31 Thailands foremost expert onelectoral politics, Sombat Chantornvong, agrees: Thedrafters of the new constitution appeared to be convincedthat they had solved the problems of legitimacy and effi-ciency that had long destabilized the Thai political sys-tem. 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 logicof corruption in Thailand links political and economicinterests. Gangsters seek to buy their way into office totake advantage of the countrys riches. As ministers, they

warp the system to direct state resources to friends andrelatives, while protecting their own illegal businesses.33

Prime Minister Banharn Silapa-acha (199596), the pro-vincial gravel merchant who enriched himself on statecontracts, famously declared in 1992 that he could notafford to be out of government very long. For such poli-ticians, business and politics are complementary: theyuse proceeds from illegal business to buy votes to getinto power, then use that power to expand and protect

their ventures.34 As Ruth McVey explains, Money hasthus come to dominate politics at all levels: one musthave money to run, and one must make money fromoffice too.35

Tochangethisbehavior,reformersrevisedthelegalframe-workof the constitution to bringaboutinstitutional change.They sought to encourage not just clean politics, but alsogood governanceaterm that often refers to a neoliberalordering of the global political economy. Starting in 1996,the IMF used the term to describe (and prescribe) eco-nomic and political reformprojects tied to structural adjust-ments.36 On the face of it, good governance is more about




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management than law, butit uses legal rules to manage eco-nomic life. In a broader sense, good governance is a prod-uct of a rational view of modern society that stresses therole of formal institutions, the rule of law, and transparentadministration.Itisalegalisticsystemofautonomous,objec-tive, and universally applied standards.37

The concept of good governance is not just the ideol-ogy of transnational neoliberal institutions. It also becamepopular in pre-1997 Bangkok when the three top opinionmakers of Thai public lifeAnand Panyarachun, Pra-

wase Wasi, and Thirayuth Boonmieach promoted it.38

Good governance also received important institutionalcachet when it was chosen as the topic of the annual con-ference of Thailands leading think tank in 1998 andbecame official government policy in 1999.39

According to the logic of good governance, the rationalimpartiality and universality of law can constrain the irratio-nal bias of politicians. Reform is instituted through con-

stitutional politics. The title of a 1994 best-selling bookthat set the agenda for the 1997 constitution is telling:Constitutionalism: The Solution for Thailand.40 To squelchcorruption and avert catastrophe, reformers changed therules of the political game by means of a twofold consti-tutional solution: (1) they severed the link between elec-tions and government ministries, and (2) they changedelection procedures to restrict vote buying.

Under previous constitutions, the Senate was notelected, but appointed by the sitting government. It wasan enclave of the military-bureaucracy that was suspi-cious of the electoral politics of parliamentary democ-racy. The House of Representatives was elected frommultiple-member constituencies. The 1997 constitutionreformed the National Assembly into three kinds of electedrepresentatives: senators, constituency MPs, and party listMPs. The Senate was directly elected from each prov-ince. It was meant to be not just an upper house forlegislative scrutiny, but also a separate apoliticalbody. AsSombat explains, The charter writers wanted the newsenate to be completely free from politics.41 Senatorshave to be pure: candidates cannot be members of polit-ical parties, and there were severe restrictions on electioncampaigning.42

The House of Representatives was divided into 400

constituency MPs and 100 party list MPs. Ministers couldnot be constituency MPs. Hence they either had to beelected from the party list, or they had to resign theirseats and cover election costs for their vacated seat.43 Notallowing constituency MPs to become ministers was seenas a clever way of cutting the link between vote buyingpoliticians and lucrative ministries. The party list ballots

would encourage voters to think of politics in terms ofparties and policy rather than personalities and vote buy-ing. The constitution also made voting a duty for allThai citizens; the hope was that expanded electoral par-ticipation would make vote buying too expensive.44

Beyond the usual restrictions that disqualify convicts, theinsane, the corrupt, and the bankrupt, candidates foroffice now had to possess at least a bachelors degree andnot be drug addicts.45

To enforce these new rules, the constitution created anindependent organization, the Election Commission of

Thailand (ECT), to run the elections instead of the Min-istry of Interior. The remit of the ECT as an independentnonpartisan organization was to run clean and fair elec-tions by sever[ing] the crucial ties that exist between pol-iticians and the civil servants responsible for administeringelections.46 Most importantly, the ECT had teeth: it wasempowered to investigate and disqualify candidates forelection 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 elec-toral system was a success. For the first time in a gener-

ation, vote buying was down in the January 2001 generalelection. As a prominent election-monitoring non-governmental organization (NGO) declared, [M]oneyand intimidation no longer produced the desirableresults.47 Because the election was organized by a neu-tral organizationthe ECTfor the first time in historysome candidates were disqualified. The voting turnout

was also strong at 69.9 percent. The reforms crafted toencourage party voting rather than personality voting werereasonably successful, raising the quality of votes as well.

According to a survey by the ECT, for constituency MPs41 percent of the electorate voted on the basis of partiesand platforms. On the party list ballot, 59 percent choseaccording to party and platform. Indeed, party member-ship was up nationwide: Thaksin Shinawatras Thai RakThai (TRT) Party recruited over 11 million party mem-bers, roughly one quarter of the entire electorate.48

The TRT Party nearly won a majority in the House ofRepresentatives, and much of its support came from ruralvoters choosing the party on the basis of its platform,

which stressed a redistribution of resources to the vil-lages.49 As it is difficult to buy votes for the party listballot, many commentators felt that the TRT Partys suc-cess showed that it was not able to simply purchase theelection. Thus the reforms encouraged parties to be more

serious about writing policy platforms and made politicalparties more of a national institution than a cobblingtogether of regional warlords.

But political reformers celebration was premature. Therewere also serious problems with the elections that tell muchabout the intimate relation of civil and uncivil capital inpolitical reform. Although the ECT was successful in usingits powers to disqualify candidates and rerun elections,this quickly became a farce as it took five months to finishthe Senate elections, producing the longest election pro-cess in world history. The limits on campaigning and theban on political party membership both were twisted by



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prominent politicians to their advantage: over one thirdof the senators turned out to be members of well-connectedpolitical families. Rather than the intended separation ofpowers between House and Senate, the Senate was turnedinto a politicians wives club, and an assembly of clansand dynasties.50

Despite hopes that the new constitution would curbelectoral fraud, vote buying continued in the 2001 gen-eral election. A bank survey noted that during the cam-paign, the flow of cash increased to $500 million, which

was $100 million more than for the 1996 election.51Whilepolitical reformers hailed the success of party voting, can-vassers used this modernizing trend to buy votes in differ-ent ways. In addition to paying voters directly for theirsupport, canvassers bought voters wholesale by recruitingthem as party members. This turns the ideology of grass-roots political parties on its head: party members do notpay membership fees to finance the local and national

branches of a democratic party. On the contrary, the partypays them. The TRT Party proudly noted that nationwideit had recruited 11 million new membersroughly equalto the number of votes its party list received.

Hence, the political reform movement, which struc-tured the constitution so as to elect a more legitimategovernment, was only partially successful. Though lessprevalent, vote buying continued in new forms; corrup-tion quickly adapts to new rules. The relation between thepositive social capital of the political reform group and theantidemocratic consequences of their activities underlinesthe problems in trying to divide social capital into civiland uncivil, bonding and bridging types. The groups thatcame together to write a new constitution carried no neg-ative externalities. Indeed, social capitalist theorists likePutnam might have hailed this coalition as an exemplarynetwork of civil society groups capable of enriching democ-racy and society through bridging social capital.

Yet, although the goal of the reformers was to effect amore participatory democratic system, their methods werequite exclusionary. The requirement that senators be apo-litical and that ministers come from the party list ratherthan constituencies abstracts politics from popular partici-pation in civil society, which social capital theorists pro-mote. More generally, the results of the 2001 election

showed how this campaign to use the law to sever theheinous relationship between political and economic powerfailed because social capital and corruption quickly adaptedto the new rules. The best example is the role of politicalparty membershipone of the standard measures of socialcapital.52 Low membership in the kingdoms informal andnonideological parties has often been listed as one of thepathologies of Thai politics. The reforms were crafted toencourage real political parties with mass membership,sophisticated administrative structure, local branches, rep-resentative leadership, ideological cohesion and concretepolicy platforms.53 But as we have seen, the 2001 elec-

tion showed how vote buying morphed into political party-membership buying, which one might be tempted todiscount as a transient election day activity, were it not forthe fact that membership and other party activities con-tinue to thrive in postelection Thailand. This is due inlarge part to the governments popular rural policies.54

Social capital formation is thus tied to new forms ofcorruption.

Good governance and its technical view of democracytherefore worked against the popular political participa-tion valued by both Thai political reformers and socialcapital theorists. The election was a battle of networks,none easily classified as civil or uncivil, bridging or bond-ing social capital. While networking may be praiseworthyin principle, in this case the Peoples Constitution wasnot embedded in society and did not encourage demo-cratic political participation. This is not a technical prob-lem of fixing the constitution to either include more Thai

citizens or plug the loopholes that allowed new forms ofvote buying; rather, it is a theoretical question of the rela-tionship between state and society.55 One must examinehow the circulation and accumulation of social capital bygood groups like the Thai political reform movementhas negatively affected society.

Good Leaders and the Coupde Technocrats

Although the political reformers were happy that the newconstitution was able to clean up the 2001 elections, they

were unhappy with the election results. Thaksins TRTParty won a landslide victory with its old-style party struc-ture, which cobbled together existing factions and veteranMPs from rival parties. This underlines how for the reform-ers, the issue was not simply the legal problem of votebuying; it was also a leadership problem. The 2001 elec-tions did not produce the good and able politicians envi-sioned by the reformers. Although the phrase does notappear in the constitution, good and able people-khon dimi khwamsamart became a catch-phrase for one of thegoals of constitutional reform. According to this narrativeof vote buying and political reform, the constitution isnot a rational-legal document setting down universal stan-

dards, but rather guidelines providing the means by whichthe moral problem of elections can be solved by goodpeople. Thai political scientist Prudhisan Jumbala notesthat the party list was not only intended to deter votebuying and strengthen the party system, but also toencourage knowledgeable candidates who are not goodat campaigning.56

Anand Panyarachun, the diplomat-turned-business-executive who became prime minister at the invitation ofthe junta in 1991, is the poster boy of the good and ableleader in this conservative discourse of political reform.

Anand, who became caretaker PM again in 1992 after the




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democratic uprising, was never elected. But many see theAnand I and Anand II governments as the most effectiveand efficient inThai memory: a business magazine declared

with glee that the 1991 military putsch was a coup detechnocrats since Anands cabinet was the dream-list ofthe 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 in1996 was chosen to be chairman of the ConstitutionalDrafting Committee.58

This desire for government by good and able techno-crats explains many of the constitutions exclusionary arti-cles. Electoral reforms such as the bachelors degreerequirement were meant to encourage better-known andmore respectable personalities to enter politics.59 Therestrictions on campaigning for the Senate were supposedto encourage virtuous metropolitan technocrats who lackedthe popular charm needed to woo the masses. The con-

servative branch of the reformist movement was moti-vated therefore by a desire for technocracy that was onlyshallowly rooted in democratic principles.60

Thus reform was not so much about including morepeople in bridging networks of social capital as it wasabout including a certain kind of personthe virtuoustechnocrat. This was accomplished through both positiveand negative measures. The bachelors degree require-ment, for example, excluded 95 percent of the electorateand 99 percent of the farmersand many politiciansfrom contesting office.

In this discourse of vote buying and political reform,then, politicians are by definition evil and corrupt; reform-ist discourse often collapses the categories of gangsterpolitician, local godfather ( jao pho), and provincial MPinto one stereotype.61 Good and able people are definedin opposition to this negative stereotype, and civil anduncivil social capital are thus intimately bound to eachother. Indeed, the 2001 election was framed by election-monitoring NGOs and political commentators as a show-down between good and able technocrats and the votebuying politiciansbetween metropolitan gentlemen andthe crass outsiders of the provincial nouveau riche.62 Usingthe same language as the junta did in its 1991 coup,political reformer Prawase warned of the dangers of par-

liamentary dictatorship,63 and many of the exclusionaryreforms echoed concerns of the military who had fordecades viewed politicians as greedy and irresponsible.64

Thus although reformers presented their activities asprogressive and democratic in spirit, their exclusionarytactics show that theirs was not a movement that departedradically from old-style politics. Rather, they reproducedmuch of the antidemocratic, indeed antipolitical, dis-course of the old military-bureaucratic elite. Democracy,in their view, is not achieved by a grassroots circulationand accumulation of social capital; rather, they see it as astate policy guided by national security concerns and anti-

communist ideology.65 Thaksins post-2001 government,with its House majority, was absolutely beyond expecta-tions of the Constitutional Drafting Committee that setup constitutional mechanisms designed with multi-partygovernments in mind.66Yet, despite its authoritarian pop-ulist character, it emerged from the political reforms.67

The history of how vote buying became the issue ofThai politics confirms the conservativism of the politicalreformers who sought good and able leaders. Vote buyinghas been around since elections began in the 1930s and

became rampant after a 1983 by-election in the provinceof Roi-Et. It became an issue of popular concern, though,only in the late 1980s, as Thailand shifted from being asemidemocracywith an elected parliament led by anunelected military prime ministerto a parliamentarydemocracy. Political power became privatized, shifting fromthe military bureaucracy to provincial capitalists.68

Suddenly, as Michael Connors argues, Analysis of formsof vote buying became a new academic pastime and a formof journalistic scoop. Military radio constantly lampoonedthe capitalist politicians.69 Stories of vote buying wereoften tied to the yet more graphic headlines of gangsters

A godmother explains how to buy votes in ruralThailand

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and godfathers.70 Benedict Andersonevenargued that theextraordinary spectacle, in the 1980s, of MPs being assas-sinated, not by communists or military dictators, but byother MPs or would-be MPs . . . [is] a positive omen fortransition from military-bureaucratic dictatorship to par-liamentary political system.71 This is because godfather-

led political assassinations demonstrated the value of aparliamentary seat and showed that the military was rela-tively uninvolvedin parliamentary politicsatleast in termsof assassinations.

Rather than moving from a bureaucratic polity to lib-eral corporatism,72 a coalition of bureaucrats and metro-politan businesspeople used the discourse of vote buyingto craft a constitution that asserted a technocratic politythat restricts representative democracy. When they deployedthe aristocratic language of good and able people, reform-ers used moral argumentation to shift voters focus awayfrom one sort of perverse social capital to anotherto the

bureaucratic-business elite, from gangster politicians. Suchmoral arguments are evidence of a battle between twosocial networks: the metropolitan bureaucratic-businesselite criticizes the perverse network of provincial capitalin order to legitimize good and able people as a pro-ductive network. Thais are left with the dilemma thatPutnam most fears: fraternity versus fraternity, one bond-ing network of social capital at war with another. Butneither the good and able people nor the provincialgodfathers can be categorized as simply civil or uncivil, asPrez-Diaz might suggest.73 Each has its own mix of legaland illegal activities, civil and uncivil social capital. Ratherthan understanding these networks as separate and coher-ent fraternities engaged in pitched battle, we might moreprofitably examine how one produces the other: indeed,much of the discourse that identifies provincial capitalistsas godfathers is generated by the metropolitan bureaucratic-business elite.

The Political Culture of Followership

While conservative reformists saw Thailands politicalpathology as a leadership problem to be solved by theconstitution, liberal reformers and social activists oftenframed the issues as a followership problem. The main

concern of liberal political reformers is not vote buying,but vote selling. Rather than being atechnicalproblem forlawyers or a moral dilemma for good people, this thirddiscourse of vote buying and political reform focuses onthe political culture of clientelism. These civil society ac-tivists proposed a reform based on the social context ofvote selling that was quite similar in theory to the socialcapital model.74 Their understanding of reform and votebuying embodies not simply the patron/client dichot-omy, but also urban/rural tensionsthe virtuous urbanmiddle-class civil society versus the perverse rural patron-age networks.

The urban/rural view of politics was popularized byAnek Laothamatas in an essay that caught the attention ofThai public intellectuals in 1995 and influenced those

who wrote the 16th Thai Constitution.75 In A Tale ofTwo Democracies he questions the received wisdom thatthe main political division in Thailand is between the

civilian middle class and military dictators (who, for exam-ple, clashed in democratic uprising of 1992). Anek arguesthat the guiding political division is between the urbanmiddle class and rural patronage networks; although therural constituencies elect governments through their con-trol of 90 percent of the seats in Parliament, urban citizensbring down governments through their vocal criticism ofpublic policy. While the urban middle class sees vote buy-ing as a perversion of democracy, Anek maintains thatelection campaigns in rural Thailand are deeply norma-tive activities, not simply villagers engaging in shamefulvote buying and perverted electoral behavior to elect

unqualified politicians.76

Vote buying is part of the socialnetwork of village life; canvassers are not criminals, butlocal leaders who achieve influence through philanthropy.

While the aim of the conservative political reform move-ment is to get good and able people into office, in ruralareas the patrons who buy votes are usually seen as alreadyhaving proven themselves such.77 For example, a streetfood vendor and a grocery store owner are two of Chiang-mai citys powerful canvassershardly the image of hood-lum politicians promoted by conservative reformers.78

According to the liberal reformist discourse, then, themoralistic approach that the urban middle class uses todamn villagers is notonly unhelpful, but inaccurate: villag-ers are acting morally within the existing social norm.79

Theproblem,accordingtoliberalreformers,isthattheurbanmiddle class is imposing its idealist view of democracyon a rural context that is still organized according to ahierarchical patron-client relationship. Villagers give theirvotes as a favor to candidates supported by canvassers whoare local worthies. Such campaigning is not an economictransaction of money for votes; for vote sellers, the cashis largely symbolic, confirm[ing] the social ties that linkhim and the local leaders.80 Hence vote buying in the vil-lages is more meaningful as circulation of socialcapital thanas circulation of economic capital. Aneks solution to the

problem of vote buying is to turn patronage-ridden vil-lages into small towns of middle-class farmers or well-paid

workers81inotherwords, to sever traditional socialrela-tionshipsand modernizerural dwellers intorational actors.

Thus although the village in Thailand is often por-trayed as the essential site of authentic Thai life, to liberalreformers the countryside is the dystopian foil against whichutopian middle-class democracy is produced. Rather thanbeing alegalproblem for the entire country, vote buying isfigured as a cultural problem of rural life. The solution,according to liberal political reformers, is not just to writenew laws but to develop new values and consciousness




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for an alternative political culture.82 Traditional culturethus is figured in this discourse as an obstacle to be over-come for the political development of liberal democracyand the economic development of liberal capitalism. As inthe good and able people view, the city is seen as themodernizing force: it is rational, advanced, developed, and

industrial. Thus for liberal reformers, even the concept ofcivil society becomes a tool used by the elite state to co-optand control grassroots politics because rural political activ-ities often are categorized as corrupt and excluded fromcivil society.83

Although this liberal reformist prescription is progres-sive in the sense that it focuses policy makers attention onthe social problems of rural life, its logic is problematic. Ituses the urban/rural distinction to argue that the urbanmiddle class needs to modernize the rural peasantry throughdevelopment programs; it does not seek to generate newnetworks of social capital that would weave urban and

rural groups together. Rather, it advocates reinvigorating atop-down rural development policy characteristic of pre-vious military-bureaucratic regimes.84 In this way, the argu-ment is susceptible to many of the difficulties seen in theprevious section: the social problem is located outside themetropolitan area, and the solution is not more politicalparticipation, but a hierarchical reform of peripheral pop-ulations through central planning and state control.

When one follows the liberal reformers advice to placecorruption in its social contextbut this time in terms ofpolitical economy rather than political culturethe radi-cal division between urban and rural space becomes prob-lematic in another way. The rise of vote buying godfathersand provincial politicians is more than simply an issue ofan urban/rural divide, morality, or good governance; god-fathers arean importantpart of theThaipolitical economy.Indeed, according to many scholars, provincial capitalismis one of the keys to Thailands economic success, not inisolation from the urban political economy, but as an inte-gral part of it.85 Due to a combination of the shift in devel-opmenttoanexporteconomyandtheinfrastructureprojectssponsored by theUnited States in theVietnamWar era, theprovincial economy took off in the 1960s.86 But because ofa weak legal system, this frontier-style capitalismdependedon close relations betweenlocal entrepreneursand local offi-

cials. Godfathers needed to cultivate localofficials to receiveprotection from the police as well as access to governmentconcessions. Conversely, officials, who as part of the Thaibureaucraticsystemwerealwaysoutsidersfromanotherprov-ince, needed to cultivate local sources of wealth and powerin the marketplace.87Thus provincial businessmen and vil-lagers often see law as an instrumental exercise of arbitrarypower imposed from the urban center.

This pattern of accumulation and circulation of socialand economic capital is familiar: it is a key strategy of thepariah 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 byThai government officials.89 As Danny Unger argues, theethnic Chinese godfathers had the social capital necessarytothriveinbusinessdespitetheabsenceofaneffectiveframe-

work of laws. Rather than this being simply a problem,

Ungerconcludes thatstateinefficiency and corruptioncre-ated ade factolaissez-faire regime for business that aidedThailands recordof fantasticeconomicgrowth.90Thisdecid-edly uncivil social capital thus was crucial in generating thecivil capital necessary for Thailands economic success.91

In the 1960s and 1970s the godfathers became morepowerful than local officials. When parliamentary politicsbecame profitable, metropolitan business leaders came togodfathers in the provinces to organize local party branchesbecause national political parties lacked local contacts.92

There is an important parallel here between local branchesof banks and those of political parties. Previously, metro-

politan banks had also recruited the local eliteincludingthe godfathersto serve as compradors for Bangkok finan-cial interests in the provinces.93 With the rise of parlia-mentary democracy, godfathers became canvassers whopieced together local election networks, much as they hadpieced together local financial networks. The urban polit-ical and economic elite thus relied on the godfathers associal capitalists to penetrate and mobilize rural areas.

In the 1980s godfathers increasingly became actors onthe national scene by sponsoring MPs, at which pointgangster politicians and vote buying became more prom-inent in the national consciousness. Hence vote buyingis one consequence of the extralegal dynamic of pariahcapitalism and official corruption. Contrary to the pop-ular view of vote buying as a problem of civilian politi-cians 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 beunderstood in their political-economic context: they weremainly a reaction to a situation where the rule of law wasarbitrary and the bureaucracy was corrupt. According toa recent World Bank report, over 40 percent of govern-ment positions in Thailand are secured through bribes.94

This shows how neither the state institutions nor thelegal framework are embedded in society in ways condu-

cive to democratic governance. From the perspective ofmany in rural areas, law is an instrumental exercise ofarbitrary power: What the Thai state declares to be ille-gal is often understood locally as officialdom laying claimto 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 socialcapital, it applauded both the military coup in 1991 andthe mass demonstrations in 1992. Rural areas, in contrast,have been a site of important social entrepreneurship,

which has produced the most interesting democratic social



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movements in Thailand. Since the mid-1990s, most ofthe important social issues have pitted the urban middleclass against rural dwellers over natural resources, a con-flict that results from Thailands industrial developmentsince 1960, in which the citys industrialization has reliedon the countrysides cheap labor, cheap food, and export

revenue.96 To combat this uneven development, farmersand rural workers started organizing themselves. Thus therural northeast has been a key site for the accumulationand circulation of social capital in the past decade. Ruralareas have been the source of Thailands major recent dem-ocratic social movements; the Assembly of the Poor, theNorthern Farmers Network, and the Small-Scale Farmersof the Northeast have all been active in building networksthat represent rural views in the urban center.97

Since the economic crisis of 1997, a localism movementhas gained currency. It looks to rural wisdom rather thanofficial urban knowledge, which it sees as foreign. Rather

than considering the political culture of patron-client rela-tions to be a problem, localists refigure village life as a socialnetwork, transforming thecommunity culture of theThaivillage into the solution to both political and economic cri-ses.98 Local knowledge is used to create alternative devel-opment strategies that do not rely on the central planningofthestate.Contrarytoliberalreformersprescriptions,local-ists do not wish to modernize rural life and atomize societyintorational individuals. Rather, communityculture local-ism romanticizes the Thai village as a harmonious organicsociety guidedby Buddhismas a wayof fighting urban civilsociety. In this way, rural social movements reverse the lib-eralreformers moralcoding of the urban/rural relation: thevillage is virtuous; the city corrupt.99 In this view, traditionis not a problem for modernity; traditional social organi-zations such as religious groups are crucial for the smoothfunctioning of modernsociety in ways that would be famil-iar to Putnam and Fukuyama.100

This understanding of urban corruption and rural socialcapital shows how the urban/rural distinction used by lib-eral reformers does not work very well as the guiding prin-ciple for understanding either corruption or democracy.Indeed, the Thai village is the site of another conceptualbattle regarding social capital. On the one hand, liberalreformers define rural life, with its patron-client relations

and perverse networks of social capital as Thailands keypolitical problem: the villages perverse networks of socialcapital warp the body politic. And while Putnam praisessmall-town lifes traditional social organizations, liberalreformers seek to destroy them by transforming the villagecommunity into a collection of modern rational indi-viduals. Community culture localism, on the other hand,champions the benefits of a productive network of localsocial capital, facilitated through mutual-aid projects andBuddhist religion. Still, the idyllic Thai village life held upby the localists is predicated on exclusion of ethnic Chi-nese traders merchant capitalism.101

Conclusion: Corruption andSocial Capital

By analyzing a seminal political event in Thai history, Ihave drawn attention to the theoretical and ethical prob-lem of the apparent dichotomy between social capital andcorruption. I conclude with a brief summary of my empir-

ical findings.The 2001 general election in Thailand was the focus of

an enormous amount of activity in Thai civil society, withmany different kinds of social capitalists associating forthe mutual achievement of public and private goods. Theelection was the first test of the new Peoples Constitution,

written by an elected Constitutional Drafting Assembly.The issue of constitutional reform itself had been keptalive over many years by a series of groups in civil society:human rights groups like the Union of Civil Liberties,prodemocratic groups like the Campaign for PopularDemocracy, electoral monitoring groups like PollWatch,

and other organizations in both the metropolitan centerand the provincial periphery.

Statistics from the 2001 election show a robust civilsociety in which social capital flourished. For the first timein a generation, vote buying was down; voter turnout washigh; and political party membership mushroomed. Andvoter participation was not limited to the educated urbanelite: rural villagers had the highest voter turnout and partymembership. The Thai countryside has been very active

with peoples movements that make demands on govern-ment policy. There is even a rural movement that seeks tocontest the centers ability to make and implement nationalpolicies: Community culture localism, with its model ofcommunity life that values social capital over individual-ism, tells us that the answers to societys problems are tobe found in the village.

Yet as I have shown, many of these social capital suc-cesses are seen in Thailand as political problems becausethey are embedded in the wrong social context. Ratherthan social capital accumulation being the main concernof activists, scholars, and policy makers, corruptionis seen as the source of the kingdoms political andeconomic ills, ranging from recurring coups to poorquality governments and economic crises. Political reform-ers judged that certain social capitalistsprovincial

godfatherswere the source of this corruption. The newconstitution was their cure for Thailands disease of moneypolitics. Civil social capital was mobilized to fight uncivilsocial capital through new rules and regulations thatexpressed the norms of democratic society. In this view,Thailand needed a heavy dose of bridging social capitalin the form of the political reform movement to coun-terbalance the excesses of bonding social capital in cer-tain sectors. Unfortunately, however, the new constitution

was not the solution to corruption; indeed, it facilitatedthe election of an even more authoritarian governmentin 2001.




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The Peoples Constitution emerged out of a nationalprocess of consultation. Yet its exclusionary provisions re-flect the urban elites mistrust of the rural electorate. Theconstitutionis certainlyembedded in a Thai social context,but it is a very narrow one that delegitimizes rural society.Many of the technocratic changes instituted by the politi-

cal reformers were antipolitical in the sense thattheyshiftedpower relations from arenas of political debate to issues oflegal-technical correctness.This urban/rural dilemma con-firms that legal and institutional reforms are notenough; togainlegitimacy, the rules and regulationsneed to be embed-ded in the larger society. Social capital theory would sug-gest that more bridging social capital activity is necessary,notjust to marginalize perversenetworks, butto spread theproductive social networks beyond the metropolitancenter.

In this essay I have expanded on Bourdieus conceptionof social capital in order to reorient research in this area. Ihavetriedtounderscoretheimportanceofprobingthecom-

plementary relationship between civil and uncivil capital.Rather than asking how much social capital a society has, Ihave asked how the civil and the uncivil define each other,in this case exploring theintimate connection between cor-ruption and social capital by analyzing the dynamic of votebuying and political reform in Thailand. While Putnam

would see this as a problem of fraternity at war with itself,I am interested in examining how each fraternity producesand depends upon its complementary opposite.

Most importantly, the concepts good governance, goodand able leaders,and civil societyare rarely discussed auton-omously in Thai texts. They take on meaning when theyare distinguished from vote buying, godfathers, andpatronage-ridden villages.Rather thanbeinga singular andcoherent thing, the essay has shown how the varied prac-tice of electoral fraud has been reified into a curious gerundphrasevote buyingwhich becomes a key subject-category to be measured, described, debated, and ulti-mately denounced by political reformists. Yet vote buyingdoes not occur in a vacuum: it must be aided or allowed bylocal government officials and supported by metropolitanbusiness.Thus corruption isnotan ethical problem ofauton-omous individuals or clientelist communities,butgrowsoutof specific relations between political and economic, urbanand rural, and official and unofficial power. I follow social

capital theorists in arguing that the solution to this corrup-tion isnotto transformruralclientsintoproperliberal auton-omous citizens; rather, the relations of clientelism must betransformed to balance various forms of social capital.

My focus on the intimate relation between corruptionand democracy is not merely to explain the curiosities ofThai political culture. I hope to encourage an examina-tion of comparable tensions between civil and uncivil socialcapital elsewhere. How do social capital and its other com-plementary opposites work, for example, in Northern Ire-land and India (sectarianism) or in Euro-America andChina (ethnocentrism)? Investigations along these lines

would add to Putnams comparative project focusing onthe quantity of social ties102 by exploring a qualitativeunderstanding of the ethics of social capital in differentcontexts. As the complicated and curious examples pre-sented in this essay demonstrate, one cannot easily sepa-rate productive from perverse social capital; the civil and

the uncivil often produce each other. Rather than being asolution to political problems, the concept of social capi-tal is itself a theoretical problem.

Notes

1 Berman 1997; Berman 2003.2 Levi 1996, 45.3 Bratsis 2003, 9.4 For another view of the politics of vote buying in

Thailand see Hicken 2002. For a more generalanalysis of the politics of vote buying see Schaffer

and Schedler 2002.5 For a discussion of vote buying and identity politics

in the Philippines, see Schaffer 2002.6 Fukuyama 2001, 7; Putnam 2000, 19; Bourdieu

1986, 24849. For a critical introduction to theconcept of social capital, see Field 2003.

7 Fukuyama 1995. Bourdieu (1986) makes similararguments, and divides capital into economic, cul-tural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986, 243, 250,25253; Bourdieu 1977, 171-83; Calhoun 1993,6970.).

8 Fukuyama 1999, 20; Bourdieu 1986, 24142, 25253; also see Field 2003, 9.

9 Unger 1998, 910. Levi, on the other hand, arguesthat social capital research is too society-focused,and that we need to bring the state back in. (Levi1996, 4951)

10 Putnam 2000; Bourdieu 1986, 256.11 Levi 1996, 5152.12 Fukuyama 2001, 8.13 Fukuyama 1999, 1617, 18, 22; Putnam 2000, 22;

Prez-Diaz 2002, 247; Levi 1996, 51; Putnam 1993,175.

14 Prez-Diaz 2002, 245; see also Hero 2003; Warner2003.

15 Fukuyama 2001, 14.16 Putnam and Goss 2002, 9.17 Putnam 2000, 35063; see also Field 2003, 7190.18 Putnam 2000, 23; this argument is suggested in

Putnam 1993, 175. For a discussion of social capitaland inequality see Hero 2003.

19 Putnam 2002, 401; Putnam 2000, 36062.20 Zmerli 2003, 68, 73.21 Putnam 2000, 22; Prez-Diaz 2002.22 Bourdieu 1986, 250.23 Connolly 1991, 64.24 Bourdieu 1986, 250; see also Callahan 2003.



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25 See Bratsis 2003.26 Pasuk and Baker 2002, 14786; Unger 1998; Hewi-

son 2000a; Pasuk and Baker 2004, 9.27 Callahan 1998; Pasuk and Baker 2002, 34184.28 Gothom 2001, 1.29 Callahan 1998; Callahan 2000.

30 Hewison 2000a; Robison et al. 2000; Hewison2000b; Pasuk and Baker 2000a.

31 Gothom 2001, 7.32 Sombat 2002, 203.33 Pasuk and Baker 2000a, 134.34 Callahan and McCargo 1996; Pasuk and Sungsidh

1994, 5197.35 McVey 2000, 16.36 IMF 1997.37 See Bratsis 2003, 1014.38 See Prawase 2002; Thirayuth 2002.39 Naruemon 2002, 191.

40 Connors 2003, 15557.41 Sombat 2002, 204.42 Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand 1997,

Section 126-29.43 Constitution1997, Section 118 (7).44 Ibid, Section 68.45 Ibid, Sections 107, 109, 125.46 Sombat 2002, 204.47 P-Net in ANFREL 2001, 100.48 Gothom 2001, 11, 15-6.49 Pasuk and Baker 2004, 8082, 93.50 Sombat 2002, 207.51 Far Eastern Economic Review2001a.52 Putnam 2000, 3746.53 McCargo 1997, 115.54 See Pasuk and Baker 2004, 19195.55 Bratsis 2003, 29. For an analysis along these lines of

the differential impact of social capital on racialgroups in America, see Hero 2003.

56 Cited in Croissant and Dosch 2001, 13.57 Jansen 1991, 16.58 Pasuk and Baker 2000a, 125; Connors 1999, 214.59 Sombat 2002, 203.60 McCargo 2002, 5.61 Ockey 2000; Pasuk and Baker 2000b.

62 See, for example, ANFREL 2001, 20; Pasuk andBaker 2000b, 39.

63 Cited in McCargo 1998, 17.64 Anek 1993, 92.65 Connors 2003.66 Bangkok Post, January 2, 2004, 2.67 Pasuk and Baker 2004.68 Anek 1996, 204.69 Connors 1999, 204.70 Pasuk and Baker 2000b, 30; McVey 2000, 14.71 Anderson 1998, 183, 175.72 See Riggs 1966; Prudhisan 1992; Anek 1993.

73 Prez-Diaz 2002, 247.74 Putnam 1993, 17475; Unger 1998.75 Anek 1996; Pasuk and Baker 2000a, 110, 157;

Pasuk and Baker 2002, 42628. Anek is now anMP and a deputy party leader.

76 Anek 1996, 202.

77 Ananya Bhuchongkul, Vote-Buying: More than aSale, Bangkok Post, February 23, 1992, 8; Calla-han 2000.

78 Viengrat 2000, 209.79 Anek 1993, 122.80 Ananya, Vote-Buying: More than a Sale, 8.81 Anek 1993, 125.82 Prawase 2002, 30; see also Callahan 2000, 12541.83 Far Eastern Economic Review2001b; Somchai

2002, 130, 135, 136.84 Somchai 2002, 13031.85 Ockey 2000, 7780; Callahan 2003, 50110;

Unger 1998.86 Pasuk and Baker 2002, 12930.87 McVey 2000, 6; Pasuk and Sungsidh 1994, 5193;

Unger 1998, 46.88 Riggs 1966.89 McVey 2000, 10; Pasuk and Baker 2000b, 38.90 Unger 1998, 57; for a broader argument about the

economic benefits of the social capital of diasporicChinese, see Cheung 2004.

91 See Fukuyama 1995.92 Ockey 2000, 7496, 83.93 Unger 1998, 5556; McVey 2000, 10; Pasuk and

Baker 2000b, 38.94 Far Eastern Economic Review2000.95 McVey 2000, 14.96 See Pasuk and Baker 2000, 128; McCargo 1998,

19; Ockey 2000.97 See Somchai 2002, 12542; Naruemon 2002,

18399; Pasuk and Baker 2002, 409.98 See Chatthip 2001, 16796; Chatthip 1991; Pasuk

and Baker 2000a, 193215; Hewison 2000a.99 See Williams 1973, 1.

100 Putnam 2000, 6579; Fukuyama 2001, 9.101 Interview with anonymous ethnic Chinese leader

in Bangkok, December 16, 2000.

102 Putnam 2002, 414.

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Capital Social y Corrupción

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