Elite circulation, rent-seeking and rank-keeping: analytical insights from the case of Thailand

Gwendoline Promsopha and Antoine Vion

Review of Social Economy, 2024, vol. 82, issue 4, 684-719

Abstract: The role of elite coalitions, violence and social orders in the development process has recently resurfaced in economic literature. In this article, we mobilize some of the literature on elite coalition, elite circulation and institutional change and provide a framework for understanding institutional change as the result of major misalignment between rent-seeking and rank-keeping. We also analyse how lock-in systems implemented by the elite in place provoke political instability.This framework is then applied to Thailand, which has experienced political instability in the past decades. The rapid empowerment of an ascending elite provoked a major misalignment between its growing economic power and the legitimacy of the established political order, i.e. a major contradiction between a rent-seeking and a rank-keeping conception of the legitimacy of elites.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2023.2171099

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