Social Capital and Corruption: Vote Buying and the Politics of Reform in Thailand

I offer a critical view of the social capital thesis, which frequently argues that more is better (and less is worse), by examining the ethics of social capital, using Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of networks as defined by their limits. I argue that social capital only assumes conceptual coherence when distinguished from its complementary opposite. I illustrate these theoretical points with a discussion of political reform in Thailand and the 2001 general election. The election exemplifies the benefits of the circulation of social capital: voter turnout and party membership were up, and civil society was active. Yet democratic achievements in Thailand were intimately tied to political corruption. In Thailand, democracy and vote buying are intimately related as examples of the productive dynamic of social capital and corruption; the civil and the uncivil often produce each other. This essay thus expands social capital theory's focus on the relations of people by examining the relationality of concepts. One has to examine the quality of social capital and the ethics of each network's inside/outside distinction. Thus rather than being a political solution, social capital is a theoretical problem, warranting further comparative research that examines how civil social capital interacts with the uncivil social capital of corruption, ethnocentrism, and sectarianism.