Chapter 5: Government Interference, Trust, and the Capacity to Perform: Comparing Governance Institutions in Thailand

Governance institutions such as the Constitutional Court and the National Counter Corruption Commission are institutions recently established in Thailand with the purpose of checking and balancing the use of government power by the executive: the prime minister and cabinet members, and bureaucrats. There are, in principle, supposed to be independent guardians who function as indirect representatives of citizens in monitoring government officials in power. Under the democratic governance paradigm (Bowornwathana, 2006a; 2001), citizens are the masters, and those in government are representatives of citizens. But the government officials in power cannot be trusted to use government power at will, and they must, in turn, be monitored by outside independent governance institutions. In a democratic governance system, there is a strong mistrust of those government officials in power. The transformation of a traditionally authoritarian polity into a democratic governance one is a radical shift from a tradition of a strong state and single-power-centered government, into a new governance system where government power is shared and dispersed (Bowornwathana, 2006b). At the initial stage, the creation of governance institutions is overwhelmed by the attempts of the strong traditional government to interfere, intrude and control governance institutions through various means such as influencing the appointments of members of governance institutions and budget allocations (Bowornwathana, 2008). Where government interference over the new governance institutions is high, there is likely to be low trust in the new governance institutions and low capacity to perform.