Trusting your fellow-voter: “better education” and the Thai election

One of the crucial factors that will determine whether last weekend’s Thai election will “hold” – that is, whether the newly elected government will be given a fair crack at governing – is the acceptance by voters that their compatriots have made a valid choice.

Part of the story of why democracy in Thailand has been so hard to consolidate is a tendency on the part of middle-class or elite voters to despise the electoral choices of their poorer counterparts. (The same applies in reverse, of course, but the elites – up till recently anyway – had more means at their disposal to ensure the ultimate outcome suited them.) Thitinan Pongsudhirak sums up “the curse of Thailand’s distorted democratic deadlock” like this: “The election winners can’t rule and the rulers can’t win elections.”

In the course of my research on Southeast Asia, I have talked to lots of people who insist that “better education” is the key to making democracies work. And on one level, of course, they are right. A higher level of general education contributes to a better ability to access information and assess arguments, and probably a different way of seeing the world. And a higher level of political education would be useful in every single country I’ve ever lived in.

But on another level, I’m bothered by this emphasis. The problem is that what we understand by “better education” often translates into “education so they think more like me”.

The laudable desire for education often masks a potentially dangerous us/them split, whereby obstacles to “proper” democracy are attributed primarily to poorer, less educated, more limited “others”, as opposed to abler, better educated, more cosmopolitan “us”.

It’s one thing to understand education as a means to ensure greater access to political debate, and to play a role in informing that debate and persuading those who participate in it.

But it’s another to see it as a prerequisite for valid participation.

If democracy is to mean anything, then surely the voices of those who are poorer than we are – or less schooled, or more religious, or more prejudiced, or whatever is our particular bugbear – must be honoured now.

If we find electoral outcomes embarrassing (and I’ve often been embarrassed by the electoral choices of my own co-constituents), then we probably need to consider the concrete interests and problems that are driving their choices, and consider whether we can change the playing-field so those interests and problems are better attended to.

Ultimately, politics is about sorting out these conflicts of interests. They can’t all be educated away.