Buddha or the Ballot: The Buddhist Exception to Universal Suffrage in Contemporary Asia

Abstract

In the spate of little more than a year, between August 2007 and September 2008, three countries with predominantly Buddhist populations enacted new constitutions. In the case of Thailand, this was just the last iteration of a turbulent constitutional history that goes back to 1932, when the absolute monarchy was overthrown. Yet it constituted a first step toward a return of some semblance of democratic processes, which had been put on hold after the army’s ‘royalist’ coup d’état against the Thaksin Shinawatra government in September 2006.^l In the case of Burma/Myanmar, the promulgation of a new constitution marked an even more significant step in the country’s transition from outright military rule toward a more democratic political system.² For Bhutan, the new constitution was the first of its kind, marking the end to an era of quasi-absolute monarchical rule in the Himalayan state.³ In all three states, then, the enactment of new constitutions was part and parcel of a process of reform intended to make their political systems appear more democratic.