Growing rapidly before the early 2000s, literature on provincial Thai politics has dwindled in recent years. This article makes a small attempt to redress this trend by highlighting one distinctive yet understudied emerging electoral dynamics in provincial Thailand. Specifically, drawing mainly on Thai-language primary sources, this paper shows that in the majority of Thailand's provinces, the Provincial Administrative Organisation, an electoral institution that has received an unprecedented amount of state funding in the post-1997 age of decentralisation, has enabled influential political families to retain and even increase their power. As political and economic power has been decentralised from Bangkok, it has ironically been centralised in the hands of a limited number of oligarchic provincial elites. This phenomenon is not an historical aberration; rather, it should be viewed as one manifestation or product of Thailand's enduring patrimonial culture, in which public officeholders’ positions are regarded as an extension of their personal or familial property. I conclude by discussing the Thai case theoretically and comparatively.

Studies of political families in the West focus on political inheritance, or the pattern of children following the careers of their parents. In contrast, studies of political families in other parts of the world focus on nepotism, corruption, and capturing of the political system in a particular area. In this study of political families in Thailand, I seek to distinguish between political inheritance and capturing a local political system. I then focus on political inheritance, finding that it is much more common than capturing a locality in Thailand. Working with a database of all members of the Thai parliament since 1932, I find that political inheritance benefits younger candidates and female candidates, with members of political families able to enter parliament at a younger age, and with women members of parliament more likely to come from a political family than men. I find further that political inheritance is found in all regions of Thailand, including Bangkok, and is not associated with different levels of development or regional cultures. With the strengthening of political parties and a declining birth rate, the number of families in the Thai parliament has declined, but has stabilised at a lower level. This indicates that political families are adapting to change, and can be expected to continue to play an important role in Thai politics.