Thailand to Score Party Manifestos for Corruption Risk Ahead of Election

A year out from the ballot boxes, Thai regulators are quietly re-drawing the rules of engagement. The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and the Election Commission (EC) want voters to see, in plain sight, whether the headline-grabbing promises of every party are sound public policy or thinly veiled favours for friends. Their new risk-screening framework—unseen in previous campaigns—could become the yard-stick by which populist pledges rise or fall.

At a glance

• New 4-pillar risk indicators will be applied to every campaign pledge that involves major public spending or regulatory change.

• The EC plans to publish each party’s scorecard online before formal campaigning begins, giving voters and investors time to digest the findings.

• Civil-society groups and business chambers have pledged to crowdsource additional data to test the numbers politicians submit.

• Thailand’s regulators say the model borrows from South Korea’s Corruption Risk Assessment and Canada’s disclosure rules, but has been customised for local political culture.

• Watchdogs argue the exercise will only work if voters, media, and the private sector actively interrogate the results instead of treating them as academic paperwork.

A fresh attempt at clean campaigning

The NACC’s acting chief Surapong Intarathawon told reporters the agency is no longer content with chasing scandals after the damage is done. Instead, the commission wants to “vaccinate” the electoral process by forcing early disclosure of budget assumptions, cost–benefit studies, and conflicts of interest built into party manifestos. The move dovetails with several charter clauses that task independent bodies with preventing—rather than merely prosecuting—abuse of power.

Under the plan, any manifesto plank that demands large-scale procurement, subsidy, or tax waiver must pass through the EC’s digital portal. Parties upload spreadsheets, feasibility studies, and third-party valuations. The portal then runs each proposal through the NACC’s algorithmic checklist. Scores will be released publicly in batches so that investors, rating agencies, and ordinary voters can compare in real time.

Four lenses for scrutiny

Regulators say the tool looks at policy drafts through four complementary lenses:

Corruption-Risk Profiling – does the idea create monopoly rents or discretionary power that can be captured by insiders?

Systematic Impact Analysis – are environmental, social, and macro-fiscal side-effects fully priced in?

Value-for-Money & Feasibility Tests – do independent auditors agree the numbers add up?

Political Will Indicators – has the party shown a track record of internal transparency, whistle-blower protection, and asset disclosure?

The score for each lens will be colour-coded—green, amber, red—mirroring traffic-light labels used on food safety charts. Officials hope the familiar visual cue will help voters understand complex financial data at a glance.

Lessons from painful populism

The framework is a direct response to high-profile fiascos in recent memory. Analysts still remember the ฿985 B rice-pledging scheme of the early 2010s that left the treasury nursing an estimated ฿519 B accounting loss. Although farm households reaped windfall gains of roughly ฿560 B, Thailand lost its crown as the world’s top rice exporter and taxpayers absorbed the debt. Another cautionary tale is the rubber sapling procurement drive linked to the previous decade’s planting boom, which—though smaller in absolute numbers—illustrated how well-intentioned rural programmes can mutate into procurement cartels when oversight is weak.

What happens next?

The EC expects to circulate the finalised checklist to all parties within weeks. Campaign teams will then have 30 days to file supporting documents for every big-ticket promise. A joint NACC–EC panel, comprising economists, engineers, and procurement lawyers, will vet the inputs. By early January, draft scorecards will go live on the EC website and be pushed to smartphones via an open API that civic-tech developers can integrate into election-tracking apps.

Failure to submit credible data is not, on its own, an automatic disqualification. Instead, delinquent policies will be flagged as “Unsupported – High Risk” beside the party logo on every official campaign poster. Regulators believe the reputational sting will be stronger than fines.

Civil society and business weigh in

Groups such as Anti-Corruption Organization of Thailand (ACT) and the Thai Chamber of Commerce have endorsed the model, but they insist that structural reforms—procurement law, conflict-of-interest rules, open budgets—must follow if Thailand hopes to push its Corruption Perceptions Index above the government’s 57-point target by FY 2027. Researchers at TDRI argue that scorecards should be published in machine-readable format so that universities, newsrooms, and even high-school debate clubs can run their own analyses.

Looking outside the kingdom

The NACC took cues from South Korea’s Corruption Risk Assessment, which screens every draft regulation for monopoly clauses before it reaches Parliament, and from Canada’s Elections Act, which obliges parties to publish audited costings within set timeframes. Thai officials believe combining these two models—pre-emptive legal review plus mandatory fiscal disclosure—offers the best hedge against policy capture in a landscape where money politics remains entrenched.

Why it matters for Thai voters

For decades, Thai elections have been decided as much by charisma and cash as by policy detail. If the new risk indicators work as advertised, they could shift the conversation from giveaways to governance. Parties that thrive on headline-grabbing handouts may find the strategy less effective when every baht is traced, costed, and rated for corruption risk. Conversely, reform-minded parties gain an evidence-based platform to sell long-term investments in education, climate resilience, and digital infrastructure.

Whether the framework becomes a genuine game-changer or a box-ticking exercise will depend on how relentlessly voters, journalists, and the private sector interrogate the numbers. Transparency alone is not a cure; public vigilance is the antidote.