Democratic Breakdown through Lawfare by Constitutional Courts: The Case of Post- “ Democratic Transition” Thailand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Third-wave democracies have massively adopted mechanisms of judicial review, notably constitutional courts, considered key institutions of successful democratic transitions. By preventing abuses of the constitution and safeguarding people's rights, they act as a bulwark against the claims of potential autocrats. In Thailand, the 1997 democratic transition led to the adoption of a powerful constitutional court tasked with safeguarding democracy from the threats of populism, corruption, and authoritarianism. Yet since its inception, the court's record has been puzzling. It has dissolved most, if not all, of the pro-democracy, anti-military political parties, dismissed all elected prime ministers, and paved the way for two military coups. In short, against established theories linking constitutional courts to democratization, the introduction of constitutional review in Thailand has led to democratic breakdown. To make sense of this puzzle, this article will investigate three variables of the court—strategic interests, ideologies, and institutional design—within the larger bureaucratic structure of the Thai state, to account for the anti-democratic behaviour of Thailand's Constitutional Court. This piece considers materials in Thai and English.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".