Aim Sinpeng

Party-Social Movement Coalition in Thailand’s Political Conflict (2005–2011)

What is the relationship between political parties and mass-based social movements? Under what conditions do parties and movements coalesce? This chapter seeks to address a gap between the literature on social movements and party politics by establishing a more systematic crossover understanding of the two fields. To this end, I examine the relationship between the Democrat Party (DP) and the Yellow Shirts as well as Peua Thai Party (PTP) and the Red Shirts during Thailand’s political conflict between 2005 and 2011. I argue that parties and movements are linked through at least two key mechanisms: (a) movements and parties join electoral coalitions and (b) movements engage in electoral mobilization. The degree to which these mechanisms operate on the party-movement relations depends on the leadership and organizational structure of the movements and the extent of the party-movement’s shared beliefs and identity. Findings drawn from extensive interviews and fieldwork observations conducted between 2009 and 2011 suggest that the PTP-Red Shirts’ overlapped leadership and organizational structure permits a close tie between the party and the movement. The Red Shirts are crucial in mobilizing Peua Thai electorally but also contribute to the party’s internal polarization. On the contrary, because the structures of the Yellow Shirts remain entirely separate from the DP from the very onset, they only coalesce to achieve short-term political gains. Implications from this study will not only fill a void in the social movement-party literature but will also provide trajectory of party-mass relations in Thailand.

Social Media Data and the Dynamics of Thai Protests

Traditional techniques used to study political engagement—interviews, ethnographic research, surveys—rely on collection of data at a single or a few points in time and/or from a small sample of political actors. They lead to a tendency in the literature to focus on “snapshots” of political engagement (as in the analysis of a single survey) or draw from a very limited set of sources (as in most small group ethnographic work and interviewing). Studying political engagement through analysis of social media data allows scholars to better understand the political engagement of millions of people by examining individuals’ views on politics in their own voices. While social media analysis has important limitations, it provides the opportunity to see detailed “video” of political engagement over time that provides an important complement to traditional methods. We illustrate this point by drawing on social media data analysis of the protests and election in Thailand from October 2013 through February 2014.

The “Crowd-factor” in connective action: comparing protest communication styles of Thai Facebook pages

ABSTRACT This study draws on theories of connective action and actualizing citizenship norms to explore online protest communication styles in hybrid social movements. We use a most-similar case comparison within a singular instance of large-scale anti-government mobilization in Thailand to investigate whether crowd-enabled elements of movements privilege a more “self-actualizing” communication pattern and how they interact with more formally organized movement elements. The results of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the posts of two Facebook pages are mixed, but do show that crowds use different language and – to an extent – more actualizing communications. They align their agenda with that of more formal social movement organizations, rather than steering away from them. This agenda-alignment is heightened during times of high-intensity and high-stakes mobilization. These results clarify the intertwinement of crowds and organizations in hybrid movements and suggest new avenues to measure connective action.