| Summary/Abstract |
Teri Caraway's very insightful paper asks us to re-think the extent to which institutions played a significant role in the electoral victories of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai Party (and their subsequent incarnations). Arguing against the so-called “institutionalists,” Caraway argues that constitutional and electoral rules did not matter in generating TRT's victory, but rather had temporal and nuanced effects. First, they mattered in terms of the magnitude of TRT's 2001 electoral win but did not explain the electoral results in and of themselves. Second, institutions helped consolidate TRT's power and were crucial in enabling the party to successfully implement its programmatic platform and therefore solidify a very loyal mass base. But once a mass base became consolidated in support of TRT, institutional engineering was subsequently less effective in shaping electoral outcomes. What Caraway most crucially shows is that one has to break down the causal effect of institutions temporally and draw a distinction between their role in a founding (and “unsettled”) moment, and then as mechanisms of reproduction.
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