In a wide range of political systems, political parties and politicians deliver special favors and material benefits to their constituents as a means of mobilizing their support during elections. This phenomenon, called patronage politics, is the focus of this dissertation. Although existing research has uncovered important variations in the patterns of patronage politics across different contexts, theories that spell out how these variations emerge over time in a single country remain relatively underdeveloped. This dissertation uses the case of Thailand to shed light on the circumstances and mechanisms that account for change and continuity in the patterns of patronage politics, relying on secondary literature, fieldwork, and face-to-face interviews with a range of political actors who have played a prominent role in upholding or contending with the use of patronage at different levels of politics at different times (1997 – 2019). This dissertation argues that in a context where getting votes by means of patronage is the pathway to gaining and holding on to power, crises that create new sources of patronage or reshape who has access to and control over preexisting ones have the potential to disrupt how patronage politics is organized. During these crises, the struggle to maintain or challenge the status quo through elections leads actors to either devise new arrangements made possible by the timing and magnitude of those crises or seize new opportunities by working through old arrangements—or sometimes do both. These choices and strategies, strongly influenced by both the characteristics of crises and features of preexisting patronage networks, give rise to different patterns of patronage politics with distinct implications for party-voter linkages and regime dynamics.

Creator

• Jatusripitak, Napon

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-1tns-yn82

Subject

• Political science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_901332
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16049

Keyword

• Patronage
• Comparative Politics
• Thailand
• Clientelism

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright