This study sought to explain the supposedly low level and ineffectiveness of political participation of ‘Chaoban’ (ordinary people) in Thailand. Deeming political cultural explanations to be inadequate, it made use of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘the Subject and Power’ together with the concept of three faces of power in doing so. The hypothesis was that the state constructed the meaning of ‘Chaoban’ in such a way as to have made the ‘Chaoban’ feel politically inadequate such that they limited their own political participatory roles. Apart from documentary research, field research involving semi-structured interviews was conducted in a rural area in Lampang Province and an urban area in the Bangkok Metropolis. This was order to discover locality differences, if any, in the outcomes of the process of construction of the self on Chaoban’s self-perceptions of inadequacy and political participatory behaviour. The finings were that there were correlations between the state’s construction of the self in ‘Choaban’ and their self-perception of inadequacy including their self-limiting political participatory behaviour. However, the correlations did not always obtain. It was not always the case that the ‘Chaoban’ would perceive their inadequacy nor would limit their own political participation. The behavioural stage depended on other environmental factors which mediated between perception and behaviour. It was found also that the ‘Chaoban’ exhibited many forms of resistance to state power. This indicated that they were not mere objects of state action but had their own tactics in responding to the state. None the less, this did not mean that the ‘Chaoban’ did not exhibit self-limiting political behaviour. It was rather that such self-limitation involved a complex process.
SUBJECT
วจนะวิเคราะห์ -- ไทย
วจนะวิเคราะห์เชิงวิพากษ์ -- ไทย
การมีส่วนร่วมทางการเมือง -- ไทย
การพัฒนาสังคม -- แง่การเมือง -- ไทย
Discourse analysis -- Thailand
Critical discourse analysis -- Thailand
Political participation -- Thailand
Social development -- Political aspects -- Thailand
