The Thai Senate: A Crisis of Representation in the Making

Thailand’s 250 junta-appointed senators have completed their five-year term. They will be replaced by a new batch of 200 senators who are self-elected from 20 social and professional groups. Despite no longer having a vote in the selection of a prime minister, the incoming Senate retains substantial powers that, given its vulnerability to elite capture, could further breed political instability and stifle democratic development in Thailand.

The problem lies in the selection criteria and convoluted procedure to appoint senators outlined in the 2017 Constitution and the 2018 Organic Act on the Acquisition of Senators, which almost guarantee that the resulting body will fall short in terms of effective representation and accountability. Being neither directly elected nor appointed, the new Senate will likely betray the liberal aspirations for it to act as a beacon of democracy and the conservative ideals for it to serve as a bastion of virtuous and technocratic rule by seemingly apolitical and impartial ‘good people’ situated above the fray.

Eligible candidates for senator positions must be at least 40 years old and have at least 10 years of experience in their professional groups. They must not be members of political parties or government officials, own shares in media companies, or have held political office or executive positions in political parties within five years before the application date, among other requirements. Additionally, candidates must either be born in the district they run in or have been registered as residents, worked, or studied there for at least two consecutive years. They must pay a 2,500-baht (about US$69) application fee, which is nearly seven times the daily minimum wage.

The selection process will take place in several stages. The district, provincial, and national levels will vote on 9, 16, and 26 June 2024, respectively. Candidates will advance based on votes from their peers and themselves within and across their respective groups. This will result in the selection of 10 senators from each of the 20 groups (Figure 1), forming a 200-member Senate.

Figure 1. Designated Professional and Social Groups in the New Thai Senate

1	Public administration and security (including former civil servants, government officials, or others with similar backgrounds)
2	Legal and judiciary (including former or current judges, prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, legal professionals, or others with similar backgrounds)
3	Education (including former or current teachers, professors, researchers, school administrators, education personnel, or others with similar backgrounds)
4	Healthcare (including doctors, medical technicians, public health workers, nurses, pharmacists, or others with similar backgrounds)
5	Rice farming and agriculture (including crop farmers or others with similar backgrounds)
6	Gardening, forestry, animal husbandry, fishing (or others with similar backgrounds)
7	Employees of non-governmental entities, labourers (or others with similar backgrounds)
8	Environmental professionals, urban planners, real estate and public infrastructure, natural resources, energy (or others with similar backgrounds)
9	Small and medium-sized business owners (or others with similar backgrounds)
10	Those engaged in businesses other than those listed in (9)
11	Tourism (including business operators, tour guides, hoteliers, or others with similar backgrounds)
12	Industry operators (or others with similar backgrounds)
13	Professionals in science, technology, communication, innovation development (or others with similar backgrounds)
14	Women’s groups
15	Elderly, disabled, ethnic groups (or other similar groups)
16	Arts, culture, music, performing arts, athletes (or others with similar backgrounds)
17	Civil society, public interest organisations (or similar groups)
18	Mass communications professionals or writers (or others with similar backgrounds)
19	Freelance workers (or others with similar backgrounds)
20	Others

The question is: what kind of Senate will take shape?

What initially appears to be a design to yield non-partisan experts will exclude the majority of Thais, particularly those who are younger and less affluent. Yet, the criteria that determine who is or is not eligible are not just exclusionary but also prejudiced in prescribing the terms and extent of inclusion for social categories that are – in political scientist James C. Scott’s sense – “legible to” and deemed worthy of formal representation by the Thai Constitution’s drafters. For example, professions in government and private sectors span multiple groups, while the elderly and the disabled are lumped together with ethnic and other identity groups. This imposition of a top-down classification does not necessarily reflect reality in Thai society and politics.

Since the laws classifying the groups were drafted and approved by junta-appointed bodies without significant public involvement, there is good reason to question their rationale. Instead of ensuring the representation of needed experts and minority groups based on their actual diversity and distribution in Thai society, the current design could, intentionally or not, dilute the voices of already underrepresented groups while amplifying the influence of overrepresented ones, among and within each of the 20 categories.

These representational imbalances are likely to be exacerbated by strategic manipulation. This would be where certain candidates choose to represent groups and localities, such as less populated districts or provinces with a smaller number of districts, based on their perceived ease of election rather than genuine affiliation or representation. A possible consequence is that the Senate will be populated not only by individuals already privileged by the system’s eligibility criteria and grouping but also by those with the resources or ability to navigate the loopholes in this system.

This Senate race could easily become a covert competition of who can best leverage personal connections and resources to form strategic alliances, rather than a fair competition based on demonstrated competence in prospective senators’ area of expertise.

Yet, the issue is not so much descriptive representation but the glaring absence of any tangible mechanism to ensure that senators are selected based on their actual capacity to address the needs of the constituents they purportedly represent. After all, the candidates will be voting by themselves, among themselves, and for themselves (Figure 2). There is no guarantee that their choices will rest on informed judgment, especially when voting for their counterparts in groups outside of their domain knowledge, let alone reflect the public’s best interests.

Figure 2. The Thai Senate Self-Election Procedure

This Senate race could easily become a covert competition of who can best leverage personal connections and resources to form strategic alliances, rather than a fair competition based on demonstrated competence in the prospective senators’ area of expertise. Sidestepping the ban on campaigning beyond self-introduction, some candidates may resort to filling the roster with their supporters or outright buying support. Having been elected by their peers and possibly by virtue of their wealth, without making any explicit pledges to the public, they can hardly be expected to serve agendas other than their own (or their sponsor’s) once in office.

This lack of accountability and coherence could leave the Senate prone to capture by undue influence, reminiscent of past encroachments on its integrity by figures like Thaksin Shinawatra.  Such a scenario would deprive the Senate of whatever legitimacy, authority, or credibility bestowed upon it by its architects, whether out of paternalism or technocratic idealism, as the drafters of the 1997 Constitution had originally envisioned. It would undermine the impartiality of independent agencies, whose members are endorsed by the Senate, and subject the process of amending the Constitution, which requires the support of at least a third of the Senate, to vested interests.

It is difficult to predict which interests will prevail in the Senate. However, if this attempt to engineer a crisis of representation backfires and prevents the Senate from fulfilling its traditional role of checking the power of elected forces, it will not be the spectre of someone like Thaksin alone that should be feared. Instead, as Thailand’s history tells us, the real concern should be about those bent on safeguarding the conservative, royal-military status quo, whose possible exclusion from formal representation could prompt them to seek a more potent, and probably more authoritarian, solution to guarantee their continued dominance in the system.

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