Unifying equality or majority rule: Conflicting democratic conceptions among thai adolescents in the City and Suburbs

Abstract

Since the 2006 military coup, the growing inequalities in Thailand's political consciousness are still uncharted, especially among the nation's youth who are inheriting the consequences of an increasingly bifurcated society. This study juxtaposes 250 interviews, surveys, and mental mapping exercises with Thai emerging adults in Bangkok and in suburban provinces to complicate simplistic binary divisions between urban and rural political opinion in post-coup Thailand. This paper argues that many suburban adolescents stress democracy's perceptual links to a uniting equality while many urban adolescents conceptually link democracy to majority rule. In the context of globalization, these conceptual conflicts reveal an intimate linkage of political inequality to global patterns of urbanization. These findings suggest subtle conceptual fault lines separating urban and suburban Thai youth, providing critical insights into the political inequalities emerging in a rapidly divided nation.