Partyforumseasia: All political parties of the world need money, and they need more and more money, especially in Southeast Asia. Election campaigns here have become more costly every year because the voters have been sort of spoiled with entertainment, gifts, transportation to rallies, and most important of all, by the opportunity of selling their vote to one of the candidates or even several of them.

Elections with enormous turnovers by vote buying and “donations” to local constituencies are common all over the region, and Thailand played quite an interesting role in this development. A real godfather of money politics was the former Prime Minister Banharn Silpa-archa, who earned the nickname Mr. ATM (automatic teller machine) for his useful skills in channeling big amounts of money at the right time into willing voters’ hands.

The bad reputation of this type of money politics is also creating attempts to reduce or even eradicate it. A newly published research paper of the ISEAS Yussuf Ishak Institute at Singapore by Punchada Sirivunnabood gives an interesting glimpse into the efforts to create some transparency for the party funding. Thailand has already some experience with state funding or party funding with taxpayers’ money. But as usual, good intentions don’t necessarily yield good results.

Punchada shows the trappings of giving money to parties who need much more than they can ever get from this type of programs:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Thailand introduced the Political Party Development Fund in 1998 as a means of providing state subsidies for political parties.

Law makers hoped that such financing would be an effective means of curbing illicit fundraising and vote buying. More importantly, subsidization would support small and new parties and promote their organizational development.

The Political Party Development Fund proved a double-edged sword, however. While it provided resources for the development of parties, it also encouraged small parties to set up numerous branches and to increase their membership for the purpose of maximizing their shares of subsidies.

The 2017 Organic Law on Political Parties introduced a new method of allocating Political Party Development Fund subsidies to political parties, with the goal of solving corruption problems associated with the existence of many small parties.

Punchada Sirivunnabood is a Visiting Fellow in the Thailand Studies Programme of the ISEAS –Yusof Ishak Institute

The full text is available under
https://www.iseas.edu.sg/images/pdf/ISEAS_Perspective_2019_50.pdf

For a regional overview see