Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand.

• Author: Fuwongcharoen, Puli

Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand. By Yoshinori Nishizaki. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. Hardcover: 308pp.

In 2011, Yoshinori Nishizaki made a significant contribution to the field of Thai studies with his ground-breaking book: Political Authority and Provincial Identity in Thailand: The Making of Banharn-buri. The book examines the rise of rural-based politicians in Thailand using Banharn Silpa-archa's dominance over Suphan Buri Province (also known as Banharn-buri) as the case study. With a wealth of data gathered in the course of his seven-year ethnographic fieldwork in the province, Nishizaki's book was both insightful and compelling. A decade on, he has produced yet another major work that is poised to become an important resource for anyone interested in modern Thai politics: Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand.

Motivated by the case of Banharn-buri (pp. xii--xiii), Nishizaki endeavours to shed light on the evolution of "dynastic democracy"--defined as "a subtype of democracy where the ruling elites are drawn chiefly from political families" (p. 3)--in Thailand since the 1932 revolution up until the June 2020 by-election in Lampang Province. He reinterprets the country's political history through the prism of patrimonial ties, arguing that the seemingly endless struggles of pro-democracy forces against military authoritarianism are actually "struggles for dominance between two main types of elite families, both of which stifle representative democracy: commoner political families and old-guard upper-class families tied to the Chakri dynasty" (p. xi). To support his argument, Nishizaki draws on an array of Thai materials, ranging from cremation volumes to personal asset records made public by the National Anti-Corruption Commission, to uncover the consanguineous and affinal ties that link numerous political figures together. In doing so, he identifies more than 700 political clans at the national level and the members of parliament associated with them, and demonstrates, often graphically, how intertwined and pervasive these clans are in the political landscape. The findings confirm Nishizaki's categorization of Thailand as a dynastic democracy (for instance, 41 per cent of all the elected MPs up to 2,000 came from political families) as well as his observation that, due to the concentration of parliamentary seats in a narrow range of kinship networks, "the more democracy has...