ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why the money has power to deliver success in elections at all levels a question that is not as self-explanatory as our own expectations and the word 'bribery' leads us to expect. It has traced a process rarely documented elsewhere: the entry of rural Thai capitalists to politics at the subdistrict and provincial level. The BMA's systematic attempts to fill its ranks with local office-holders and politicians indicate that the balance of power between bureaucratic authority and civil society at the local level has not changed significantly. As part of a broad policy to encourage decentralization and democratization, local government at the subdistrict level has been radically reformed. The failings of Thai democratic decentralization at the provincial level and the relatively negative prognosis for Subdistrict Administrative Organization (SAO) recounted here make for rather dismal reading. National elections arouse less local interest in provincial Thailand than do elections for provincial, subdistrict and village positions.
