Crowdsourcing Dictatorship in Thailand

• In Event: Compromising Democracy: Agents of Democratic Regression in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Why do ordinary people in democracies oppose democracy? Under what conditions do people in democratizing societies turn against democratic regime? The extant literature on democratic breakdown tends to focus on structural factors such as economic crisis and inequality or on elite factors such as intra-elite conflict in explaining the breakdown of democracy. The assertion that democratic collapses are ultimately the product of elite choices, while correct, obscure the grassroots factors that may shape elites’ decisions to overthrow democratic regime in the first place. This article seeks to “bring the masses back” into the debate about how and why democracies end. Using the case of Thailand whose democracies collapsed in 2006 and 2014, I argue that ordinary people mobilize against democratic politics due to their conflicting visions of democracies. On the one hand, some want the majoritarian version of democracy where the wishes of the majority matter most. One the other hand, some want the power-sharing version of democracy where its people are included in the political decision-making and its executives restrained. This clash of two incompatible visions of democracy in turn gave rise to two mass anti-democratic movements, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), whose frequent, incessant, and often violent street protests facilitated military coups d’état in Thailand. Using a mixed-method approach that combines original datasets of social media data and elite interviews, this study shows mass support for ending democratic politics rooted in the notion of this zero-sum game between majoritarian versus power-sharing principles of democracy. The in-depth case study of Thailand makes a theoretical contribution to the study of democratic breakdowns by challenging the predominant elite-centric explanations for democratic collapses by offering rich accounts of how ordinary people play a key role in the demise of democracy. Moreover, the study challenges to notion that social media has a power to strengthen democracy.

Author

• Aim Sinpeng, University of Sydney