Candidate Selection in Thai Political Parties

Abstract

The political world is regulated partly by formal institutions, such as electoral laws and internal party rules, and partly by informal institutions, such as clientelist networks. Both types of institutions need to be taken into account if we wish to gain a holistic understanding of politics. This is certainly also true when uncovering the gendered nature of Thai politics. When the interest lies in understanding parliamentary composition and representation patterns, it is necessary to study political parties and the manner in which they select candidates to stand for parliamentary election. The aim of this chapter and the next is to answer the question of how and why clientelism is gendered and how it filters through the candidate selection procedures of political parties and how it matters for representation patterns. In other words, we now move from studying the larger independent variables that have been the subject of the past two chapters, to focusing on the causal mechanisms that translate clientelist practices into male parliamentary dominance. The two necessary pieces of the causal chain between the two concern candidate selection and homosocial capital.