Democrat Party and Cambridge Analytica

PPT has done a bit of a search related to Cambridge Analytica, the parent company SCL Group and Thailand. The most detailed account we can find is at Investvine. We are unable to verify the claims made, but thought readers may be interested.

The story begins with a claim that is at the SCL and CA sites. This is the boast that the firm “influenced a past election campaign in Thailand for an unnamed client.”

SCL claims it “built and managed the world’s largest campaign center” for an election campaign in Thailand. It further claimed to have used it:

“cutting-edge Behavioural Dynamics Institute methodology” enabling it to correctly determine Thai voter behaviour down to the constituency level, which resulted in considerable campaign savings for the client and permitted a more targeted use of resources – all centrally controlled from the operations center.”

Investvine’s Arno Maierbrugger says that this intervention:

seems to be related to Thailand’s 1996 election when SCI (Cambridge Analytica was only founded in 2013) seems to have used behavourial analytics to support the campaign of Democrat candidate Chuan Leekpai who eventually became prime minister after a substantial tug-of-war with competing populist New Aspiration Party. The company illustrates its case study with the display of a Time magazine cover from March 30, 1998, with the title “Thailand’s comeback kid” with Leekpai being portrayed as the election winner.

Investvine’s comments on Thailand’s politics are limited. It is true that Chuan’s party did substantially better in the 1996 election than it had in 1995. Even so, the Democrat Party went into opposition. It was later hoisted to power in murky circumstances and sans election in late 1997.