The Study of the Poor People's Movements and Democratization in Thailand

Limitations of the Political and Social Movement Approaches

Abstract

In Thailand, poor people's movements have a significant role in escalating public sphere and democratization by demanding the state to solve problems confronting and by legislating the law relevant to the problems. These poor people's movements show that power relation between the state and the people has changed. The emergence of the poor people's movements after the mid 1990s was consistent with the emergence of the New Social Movements or NSMs in many regions around the world. These NSMs are different from the orthodox Marxist's socialist movement, so the old theoretical framework based on the Marxism concept is not sufficient to explain the phenomena, resulting in two new approaches : new social movement paradigm in Europe and the political opportunity structure paradigm in the United States.