บทบาทของ "สมาคมองค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดแห่งประเทศไทย" ในการผลักดันการกระจายอำนาจ / ปิยะมาศ ทัพมงคล = The roles of the "Provincial Administrative Organization Council of Thailand" in pressuring for decentralization / Piyamart Tupmongkol
This study analyzed the roles of the "Provincial Administration Organization Council of Thailand" in pressuring for decentralization, with reference to two occasions of doing so. The first was in pressuring for the Provincial Administration Bill of 1997, the second was for direct elections of provincial administration presidents. It also analyzed the characteristics of the "Council". The study found that the "Provincial Administration Organization Council of Thailand" was an interest group which had non-associational, institutional and associational characteristics simultaneously. This mixed feature is indicative of it being an interest group in a developing society. It was also an insider group in terms of access to national political decision-makers. In successfully pressuring for public policy, the "Council" used interpersonal relationships between its officers and national politicians as the channel of access on both of the occasions studied. Nonetheless, the "Council" had to expend more effort and timein achieving success in pressuring for direct elections of the provincial administration council presidents than for the Provincial Administration Bill of 1997. This was due to two factors; first, a change in the political opportunity structure, namely the addition of party list MPs who were not dependent on local electional bases; second, a lesser degree of unity within the "Council".