Asymmetric policy capacity in hybrid regimes: from structural asymmetry to capacity divergence in Thailand’s political crises

Hybrid political systems often possess the capacity to impose order during crises without the institutional arrangements needed to legitimate and learn from those responses. This article develops the concept of asymmetric policy capacity to explain the pattern. Building on policy capacity theory, it argues that operational, political, and analytical capacities in hybrid regimes are not necessarily complementary attributes of a unified state but are distributed across rival authority centres with misaligned accountability. The framework distinguishes structural asymmetry as the background distribution, asymmetrization as the crisis-activated use of operational dominance that bypasses institutions carrying electoral legitimacy and plural information, and capacity divergence as the resulting post-crisis configuration. Using process tracing of Thailand’s 2006 military coup, 2008 judicial-political deadlock, and 2010 street confrontations, the article shows how crisis responses repeatedly achieved operational settlement without political resolution, fragmenting elected political capacity and weakening civilian analytical autonomy. The findings challenge complementarity assumptions in policy capacity theory: in hybrid regimes, governance failure may arise less from aggregate capacity scarcity than from how capacities are distributed across rival centres of authority.