African Journal of Political Science

African Journal of Political Science ISSN 3461-2165 Vol. 14 (1), pp. 001-015, January, 2020. © International Scholars Journals

Full Length Research Paper

Dynamics of government decision-making process on the policy level towards Thai State owned enterprises (SOEs)

Sutada Mekrungruengkul

Faculty of Public Administration, National Institute of Development Administration, Thailand. E-mail: [email protected].

Accepted 15 October, 2019

Abstract

This research study on the government decision-making process on the policy level towards Thai State owned enterprises (SOE) offers some ideas that may provide a useful interpretation of the government decision-making process on the policy level of public administration. The researcher aims to propose a better understanding of government policy formulation and implementation towards Thai SOE through two case studies. The findings of the study support the analytical framework that in the stage of agenda setting, the garbage-can model is the decision-making model that helps explain the processes of agenda setting, due to the variety of participants that influence the decision-making processes. However, the incremental model is more explanatory in the following stage. Once the policy is decided and implemented, policies are formulated and the day-to-day operational decisions are made incrementally by the ministry’s high-ranking officials and the SOE management. Moreover, the researcher found that government policies towards these two SOEs were, very often, on and off, and the government took about three to four decades with several governments to push the policies to be implemented and accomplished.

Key words: Organizational decision-making process, State owned enterprises (SOEs), satisfying model, incremental model, garbage-can model, the garbage-can model in political institutions as according to Kingdon‟s theory, Thai administrative culture, the politics of despotic paternalism.