ABSTRACT
The Thai parliament has been a neglected field of study for many years; little or no attempt has been made for a systematic examination and elucidation of significant issues of its roles, functions and actors, including the pattern of its involvement in constitutional drafting and framing political institutions, the roles of members of parliament (MPs), as well as the work, deliberations, and oversight functions of its committees. Among the handful of studies are Chai-Anan Samudavanija's examination of legislative capabilities in Thailand in 1986 1 and Montri Rupsuwan's identification of problems and obstacles in the development of the Thai House of Representatives in the period 1979–1986. 2 A more up-to-date and extensive work on changes in legislative roles is found in Aaron Stern's dissertation entitled “Institutional Change in Legislatures: Thailand's House of Representatives 1979–2002”. 3 In all, the literature on the Thai legislature suffers from a lack of adequate data on the development of parliamentary institutions, especially in relation to recent political and constitutional changes. This chapter seeks to remedy some of these deficiencies by aiming to achieve four goals:
to review in what ways the Thai parliament defines the rule of democracy, i.e. in what ways parliament participated in framing Thailand's constitutions;
to assess the organizational structure and functions of the Thai parliament. The most frequently named among parliament's functions in the government are its legislative and oversight functions which also define legislative-executive relationships and systems of accountability;
to investigate the composition of the Thai parliament as collective actors with representative functions based on a common understanding that MPs individually, and through political parties and parliament, establish linkage, leader recruitment and representative functions of aggregating as well as filtering societal interests;
to analyze the nature and dynamics of the relationship between the Thai parliament and external factors affecting parliamentary decisions. External influences that shape the behavior of actors in the Thai parliament included in this chapter are civil society, the mass media, and the military.
