This paper argues that the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand, Buddhist Era 2540 (1997 Constitution) required nationalization of party and catchall party, and that Thaksin Shinawatra (Thaksin) and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party won the majority in the 2001 and 2005 elections because he could succeeded in making the TRT catchall party. The nationalization of party and catchall party nationalized Thai politics which replaced the previously atomized political space in Thailand.

Thai politics have become unstable and authoritarian since the 2001 election. Mass politics have emerged and linked to elite politics, which previously were separate from the masses including farmers. However, most studies on the 1997 Constitution and Thaksin politics have focused on the ways that the 1997 Constitution helped Thaksin and the TRT win the elections, which allowed them to challenge the traditional political powers. Focusing on elite politics is necessary, but it is not sufficient to explain current Thai politics, which have essentially changed in response to mass participation in national politics. Before the 2001 election, the electorate was atomized regarding candidates or a district’s Puak (informal political groups) through patron-client relations and influence peddling. Elections were limited to individual candidates, and the brands of political parties and their platforms were not important to election campaigns. Therefore, the electorate was not engaged in national politics even when it was highly aware of those politics because the political structure was a fragmented political space.

The 1997 Constitution established a system for elections in single-member districts, a party list system, and a powerful prime minister. The new institutional changes required the nationalization of party and, which, in turn, provided strong incentives to implement social policies that spread benefits throughout the country. TRT was able to respond to the changes using Puak politics, social policies, and image-oriented election campaigns to win the national majorities. However, TRT did not build a strong national-level party organization because Thai society lacks strong mid-level groups connecting the electorate to political parties, such as labor unions, agricultural cooperatives, and civic groups.

As a result of the nationalization of party and advent of social policies, the farmers, large part of electorate, began to demand political citizenship and social citizenship, which promoted the nationalization of political space. The middle class, as part of the masses, and the elite, such as the junta, the bureaucrats, and the monarchy, oppose the nationalization of politics because they feel it challenge their interests.

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International labor movement in the Asian region has become widely recognized as an important factor giving potentially multi-level and complex socio-economic impacts on sending as well as receiving countries. Conventionally, today's cross-border activity is understood in the context of economic globalization embodied as expanding multidirectional foreign trades and direct investments, and also interpreted as a natural consequence of the differentials in job opportunities and income levels among separate regions. This article, however, demonstrates that the international movement of labor is not a simple function of the globalizing market economy, nor one driven merely by industrial forces. Rather, it states that, in some instances, the causes and effects of accepting foreign workers, become unavoidably political and even highly diplomatic in nature.
In the late 1980s, Taiwan began to import low-skilled labor from neighboring countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, intending to solve serious labor shortages in construction, manufacturing, and, more recently, care industries. Afterward, economic downturns and sociocultural frictions between migrant workers and the host society led Taiwan to employ a more restrictive policy toward foreign labor. In spite of the policy changes, Taiwan acquired new exporting countries: Vietnam in 1999 and Mongolia in 2004.
Taiwan's labor importing policies are conditioned by the particular international political contexts in which the island has been placed. Taiwan has been desperate for low-skilled labor from abroad in order to avoid a decline in its industrial competitiveness and thus economic performance, which is believed to be a key to Taiwan's international status. However, it had to be achieved without recourse to the rising economy of People's Republic of China, which may threaten the autonomy of the Taiwan polity itself. Under these constraints, policy towards foreign workers in Taiwan has been gradually recognized as not only a temporary measure to mediate the labor shortages, but a diplomatic component of Taiwan's “Go South” policy.
Throughout the case of the air dispute with the Philippines (1999-2000), the denial of an senior Taiwanese official visit to Thailand (2002), and many others, these examples show that foreign labor was utilized as Taiwan's diplomatic resources to enhance foreign relations or as bargaining chips to give Taiwan an advantage in diplomatic negotiations. Suspending, or hinting at an intention to suspend, the import of workers from source countries has contributed to Taiwan's self-interest in several instances. Despite the unclarity of Taiwan's international legal position and the difficulty of evaluating the actual effects of this diplomatic resource on Taiwan's external relations, this case analysis indicates the logic of how labor movement across borders can be turned into a crucial variable of the contemporary international political economy.

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In 1992, the Thai government approved in principle the first Community Forest (CF) bill, as submitted by the forest administration. However, as of April 2009, the bill had still not been enacted into law, although it has come close to passage many times. This study seeks to clarify why the Thai CF Act has not come into effect and the political/social context surrounding it, especially before the military coup in 2006. An earlier study has pointed to persistent antagonism and a lack of discussion between two sections of society: social activists supporting local villagers and forest conservationist NGOs. This study examines both the struggles within civil society and the interests of stakeholders inside the Thai state, including the cabinet, parliament members, and royalist organizations. The problems with the Thai CF Act ensue from the combination of an increase in the value of forests and the three types of democracy that have operated in Thailand, participatory democracy, parliamentary democracy, and Thai special democracy, in addition to the conflicting interests of civil society. The increase in the value of forests includes increases arising from the multiple functions of forests and from decentralized resource management. The Thai state organizations sought to serve their own political/social interests, which included interests not directly related to the enactment of the Thai CF Act, by linking the increase in the value of forests to the type democracy that they supported.

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