91福利

Special Lecture - Reluctant populists: Learning populism in Thailand

Kevin Hewison
Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Politics and International Studies
Director, Asia Research Centre
Murdoch University

Almost all popular and academic assessments of Thaksin Shinawatra label him as a populist and suggest that his time in power was characterized by populism and populist policies. In this paper, through a brief assessment of the constellation of theoretical and conceptual accounts of populism and a discussion of Thaksin’s period of political activism, suggests that this characterization misses an important element of Thaksin’s politics and of populism as a form of politics. It is argued that Thaksin was not a populist when he came to the prime ministership in 2001. While he was electorally popular, his populism was slow in developing. Thaksin’s emergence as a populist reflected a particular configuration of political circumstances that forced him to rely on the support of an electoral base of the relatively less well-off provincials of the north, northeast and central parts of the country. Thaksin was made a populist by elite opposition, demands associated with socio-economic inequality, electoral rules and his party's electoral performance.