Changing Patterns Of Political Participation And Political Attitudes In Contemporary Thailand

Since ancient times,political participation has been an important indicator of a country's political development and political democratization.In the 1990s,the"third wave of democratization"covered most of Southeast Asian countries.However,as a complex member of the Southeast Asian countries,Thailand has a tortuous process of democratization and a slow pace of political development.From 2001 to 2014,Thailand experienced several general elections,and the ruling party and leaders have changed again and again.In this context,Quantitative Research Method is used to analyse this topic from four-times survey made by Center for East Asia Democratic Studies and to analyse the political participation and political attitudes of Thai citizens in different periods from the perspective of micro¯o and compare their variation trend vertically.According to the analyzing results of data in this paper,in terms of political participation,the first is institutional political participation.Although Thai citizens show a high willingness to participate in voting,the voting rate fluctuates in four periods.The second is non-institutional political participation.Due to historical factors and the influence of participation channels,only a few Thai citizens have chosen the mode of non-institutional political participation.Among them,the participation rate for campaigning and gatherings is relatively high,while the proportion of people who have participated in demonstrations and contacts with the official government is small.Secondly.In terms of political attitudes,the first is a survey of the political attitudes of Thai citizens.Analyzing from the four data from 2001 to 2014,Thai citizens have shown strong interest in politics and would often pay attention to political news;The second is the democratic investigation.Similarly,Thai citizens are also very satisfied with the government's democratic work.With the support of authoritative authorities,Thai citizens have a positive attitude towards democratic when it comes to the democratic government and autocratic government,but have shown some negative attitude on democracy when it comes to democracy and economic development.The results of the final regression model show that the correlation between the five independent variables and the participation in the voting is not significant.For example,the difference in the number of people between the independent variables in the Thaksin period is small,and the difference in the number of people between the independent variables in the Abhisit period and Yinglak period has increased significantly.However,the participation rate of Thai citizens in each period is very high.The correlation between income level and non-institutional political participation is the most significant.In particular,the higher the income of the real-time income,the fewer people participate in non-institutional political participation,and the correlation between several other independent variables and non-institutional political participation is inapparent.The correlation between the independent variables and the political interests of Thai citizens is significant,especially between different genders.The first three survey data show that men are with higher political interest compared to women,but the fourth survey shows that women are with high political interest compared to men.In terms of the attitude of Thai citizens towards democratic,the public is more inclined to choose a democratic government compared to an autocratic one,but in the face of democracy and economic development,lower priority for the democratic is shown.