Political Markets under the 2017 Constitution of Thailand: The Policy Markets within the Ideology Markets

Abstract

Under the framework of Constitutional Economics, seeing the political system as a market and believing that political actors are rational. The constitution acted as a tool for transferring preference between political markets and political actors.

The promulgation of the 2017 Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand and its subsidiary has transformed the Thai political market, Converting from a duopoly market into a semi-competitive oligopoly market with a large number of sellers. These changes are a result of barriers to entry into the election market by establishing the election method that reduces the utility of political parties and beneficial to a specified political party.

Besides, the constitution aims to change the objectives of the political market as well, the destruction of the ‘policy market’ and the exchange process in political markets that the voters may not get the most utility, both from the micro-level constituency policy and the macro-level national policy as before.

With the reasons mentioned above, changing the constitution is inevitable affects the political market. This change has caused the political market under the 2017 Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand to change from a ‘policy market’ into the form of ‘Ideology Market’ that has its characteristics and differentiate from general cases.