Party banning and the impact on party system institutionalization in Thailand.

• Author: Sinpeng, Aim
• Position: Report

The vast literature on comparative politics points to the important role political parties and party systems play in a democratic polity. (1) Political parties are seen as crucial components of democracy, for they aggregate, articulate and represent societal interests. At the very heart of a democratic system is party competition that allows for governmental succession. In The Indispensability of Political Parties, Seymour Lipset argues for the centrality of "institutionalized party competition". (2) Party institutionalization is also thought to be important for the development of party systems as well as democracy. A well-institutionalized party system is believed to contribute to a more efficient government and well-functioning democratic system.

Samuel Huntington's Political Order and Changing Society provides an analytical foundation for subsequent scholarship on party institutionalization. According to Huntington, institutionalization refers to "the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability". (3) Most scholars have concluded that when Huntington discussed "party institutionalization", he was referring to political parties and not the party system. (4) On the contrary, the most oft-cited work on measuring party system institutionalization is that of Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, who built on Huntington's foundational piece. Their twelve-country study concluded that party system institutionalization is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democratic consolidation. (5)

Mainwaring and Scully argue that party system institutionalization can be measured across four dimensions: first, stability; second, roots in society; third, legitimacy; and fourth, autonomy. Stability refers to the extent to which the party system exhibits regular party competition. The accepted norm is to use electoral volatility--which in most cases refer to the Pedersen Index (6)--to measure party system stability. A party system is institutionalized when its political parties are well-rooted in society. Party identification is an important indicator of this dimension, as it measures party-voter linkages from an attitudinal perspective: how well voters can identify political parties based on their programmes or ideologies. A party system is considered legitimate when its electorates view parties and elections as a crucial part of political life. Finally, a party system is considered to be weakly institutionalized if political parties are merely personal instruments of certain political leaders. (7) Parties should exhibit autonomy from both political elites and the state for them to be institutionalized.

I thus diverge from the dominant approach on measuring party institutionalization through the use of electoral volatility by instead relying on more context-based and qualitative indicators. For this paper, I provide a tentative analysis on how party banning affects two dimensions of party institutionalization: legitimacy and autonomy. A major pitfall of using electoral volatility is that in new democracies, where the party system is fluid, we cannot distinguish whether the volatility is caused by voters' shift in preferences or the entry and exit of parties. (8) Given that party dissolution will inevitably mean old parties cease to exist (or in this case "die") while new parties are created, electoral volatility is not an appropriate stand-alone indicator for measuring institutionalization. Moreover, electoral volatility is a problematic indicator of how party banning affects party institutionalization because party banning has a necessary direct effect on measures of electoral volatility. Given that the meaning of the electoral volatility measure necessarily changes if active parties are banned, we no longer can use the measure as an independent indicator of party system institutionalization.

This article also makes an analytical distinction between the effects of party banning on party institutionalization and democracy. There is a tendency among scholars of comparative politics to conflate party institutionalization and democratization and view them as positively related. (9) This stems partly from the fact that much of the earlier scholarship on party institutionalization has been informed by cases in Europe, and to some extent Latin America, which have either well-established democracies or some roots in democratic traditions. As such, while institutionalized party systems are seen to contribute to democratic durability, the analytical differentiation of the relationship between institutionalization and democratic consolidation remains less clear.

More recent scholarship that examines institutionalization among new democracies does not presume that party institutionalization and democratic consolidation are mutually reinforcing. Ricky Randall and Lars Svasand's ground-breaking work on party institutionalization in new democracies concludes that when party institutionalization hinges upon ethnic exclusivity, it represents a real danger to democratic development. (10) A comparative study of twenty-eight African political parties, according to Matthias Basedau and Alexander Stroh, examines exclusively the level of party institutionalization across their African cases without tacit assumption on the level of democracy of each individual case. (11) Likewise Allen Hicken and Erik Kuhonta's comparative study on party institutionalization in Asia points out that the party system institutionalization and democratic consolidation are not necessarily convergent. (12) Indeed, their analysis of party systems in both democratic and authoritarian regimes in Asia finds that authoritarian party systems can have a high degree of institutionalization. To this end, while the Thai case points to the importance of strengthening party institutionalization as an overall strategy for the country's return to the path of democracy, this article analyses the effects of party banning on institutionalization and democracy separately.

Prior scholarship has considered economic development, historical legacies and demographics as contributing factors to the level of party institutionalization. (13) Party banning and dissolution is often overlooked as a potential contributor to a party system's level of institutionalization. Through the case study of Thailand, this article seeks to fill the gap by analysing the ways in which the dissolution of key political parties and banning of politicians impact party institutionalization. Dissolving and banning parties during democratic times have two major consequences on party institutionalization. First, it significantly hampers party organization. Second, party banning in turn promotes clientelism and patronage, which relies on pork barrel politics and deters parties from establishing deeper roots in society. However, the banning and dissolution of parties seems to have little effect on the legitimacy of the party system as a whole.

The article proceeds as follows. The first section discusses the concept of party banning with references to recent empirical cases around the world. It then provides justification for the indicators chosen to measure how party banning affects institutionalization in Thailand. The second section introduces the Thai case and provides in-depth empirical analysis to the causes of party dissolution and banning in Thailand. Based on the chosen dimensions and indicators, I then analyse how party banning impacts party institutionalization. Lastly, I conclude with a brief discussion of this article's contribution to the study of party systems in new democracies and provide tentative remarks regarding the implications of party banning on democratic development.

Party Banning

Why do political parties in a democracy get banned? Restrictions on political association and expression are at odds with fundamental democratic values. Yet, the banning of political parties in a democratic system occurs for two key reasons: ideological exclusion and party system regulation. Empirically, few democratic states outrightly ban political parties, and the few that occur happen largely out of ideological concerns. Since the Second World War, party banning has been largely related to concerns over the extreme right wing. (14) In Germany, the successor parties to the Nazi Party were outlawed as a measure against extremism. (15) During the Cold War, some countries resorted to banning communist parties on the grounds of national security. For example, Australia sought to suppress communism through the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950. (16) South Africa and Chile also enacted similar legislation in the hope of extinguishing communism. In recent years, many African states have also sought to ban identity-based parties to prevent ethnic conflict. According to Anika Moroff, most sub-Saharan countries have outlawed identity-based parties, particularly those of an ethnic nature, following decades of ethnic conflicts that have plagued the region. (17)

Yet, the occurrence of banning "extremist" parties not only happens in new democracies but also in liberal democracies. European countries have faced difficulties dealing with what the political elites perceive as "non-democratic parties". Angela Bourne's comparative study of twenty-two party bans in Europe finds that the majority of banned parties were far-right or separatist parties. (18) In 2002, Spain's Supreme Court declared the Batasuna Party, or the Basque separatist party, illegal as a counter-terrorism measure. (19) Subsequent governments have sought to prevent the re-emergence of Batasuna under a new name. In 1998, the European Court of Human Rights allowed for the dissolution of political parties that the Turkish government deemed to have incited violence and undermined the country's sovereignty. (20)

Another reason for the exclusion of some political parties is due to party system regulation and party...