Cambodia Political Leadership
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Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 29
Public Policy and Policy Platform of the Political Parties
This part (29), the author Mr. Sophan Seng renewed his talk regarding the Public Policy and Policy Analysis that are the cornerstone for the Policy Platform Crafting. By exposing the finding from Asia Foundation on their survey to collect political opinions from the Cambodian constituents, the summery of key recommendation for the political parties, are following:
1. Corruption is perceived as the biggest problem facing Cambodia. Including a counter-corruption objective in a political party platform will broadly appeal to the electorate’s desire for change. While individual politicians can increase their popularity by leading highly visible counter-corruption campaigns in the run-up to the next national elections, a greater degree of transparency in the conduct of political parties can counter feelings of distrust of political parties, as the survey findings demonstrated.
2. At the local level, poverty, unemployment, and associated issues are perceived as the biggest problems. Visible commitment at the local level to addressing the root cause of these issues will likely be highly popular.
3. Although vote buying or gift giving may still be an effective strategy for getting out a party’s own supporters, it is clear that in Cambodia it is not effective in changing how voters choose to vote. Parties that wish to attract new voters would be better off spending their resources to develop and publicize programs attractive to the electorate at large.
4. It is clear that the public favors political decentralization, with very large majorities in favor of directly elected officials at all levels. Although political parties would prefer to retain control over the selection of officials, there is a huge potential electoral payoff for any party willing to embrace political and fiscal decentralization.
5. The political parties in Cambodia have failed to differentiate themselves in the public mind, and due to the nature of the electoral system, it is likely that voters associate the parties more with their leaders than with specific programs. Developing a detailed platform that can be distilled into four or five bullet points, to be repeated over and over, will differentiate the parties in the public’s mind. Periodic polling will help determine if their messages are sinking in and to gauge their popularity with the general public. These polls will then allow parties to fine-tune their messages as they prepare for the 2018 elections.
These five bullet-points are wholly derived from the finding. It is imperative to comprehend that these recommendations subsumed from the research don’t mention the border effort to protect from neighboring encroachments. This absence might be caused by:
– The borderline issues are more sensitive issue that shall not build strong foundation for the nation in sustaining development, and it is regarded as more polarized than unified within a nation-state if the state institution is not strong.
– It is possible that the researchers didn’t include questions towards the respondents, or the general opinions are too vague on the issue.
In brief, the key recommendations to the political parties are:
– Crafting robust policy platform to anti-corruption
– Family economy improvements through creating more jobs and increase price of their agriculture products as well as to provide them cheap or free healthcare and seniors salary etc.
– Focus more on robust policy and genuine political will than to encourage vote-buying
– Need more decentralized and delegate administration of the party than to consolidate the central power, or organize candidate elections than conduct direct nomination.
– Parties must prepare well-informed information on their political policy platform than to persuade vague personalities to attract the voters.
At the end, the borderline trigger to maximize nation’s interests is imperative but they must be putting aside the attack on each other.
Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 28
This part (28) which is broadcasted by CMN Khmer Radio in July 12-13, 2015, the author Mr. Sophan Seng continued to discuss the Sun Ray Policy Platform phase 3. For this phase, different from phase 1 and phase 2 on lifting up and building up shadow cabinet of the opposition party CNRP respectively, the author talked about the importance of Public Policy, the meaning of it, and its theoretical and practical frameworks to adding towards the meaningful Policy Platform of a political party.
According to Bardach Eugence, a meaningful public policy analysis consists of eight steps:
1. Define the Problem
2. Assemble Some Evidence
3. Construct the Alternatives
4. Select the Criteria
5. Project the Outcomes
6. Confront the Trade-offs
7. Decide
8. Tell Your Story
The author himself had experienced during his schooling for the courses on Public Policy Analysis by joining practicum with the office of Honolulu city mayor. His analysis mainly focused on the Political Participation for the Neighborhood Board policy of the city. While his key criteria were “cost benefits, administrative feasibility, and political 
acceptability” to be used for his study, the concepts of efficiency, equality, political acceptability, and robustness etc. are widely useful for analysts.
Drawing from these contextual frameworks, Cambodia political parties are in need to focus on policy than to focus on leader figures as also claimed by Asia Foundation, in which the author shall discuss in details for the next part of “Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth” program.
Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 27
This part of 27th on “Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth” broadcasted in July 5 and July 6, 2015, the author Mr. Sophan Seng continued to talk about the prospect of Sun Ray Policy Platform in second phase.
Sample of UK Westminster Political System
Different from first phase expressingly upgrades the higher portfolio of the opposition party, this second phase is about the legal activity of the opposition to setting up their own shadow cabinet.
There are different names being used in major democratic countries on this opposition teaming-up scenario such as shadow ministers, shadow cabinet, group of critics, or shadow government etc. In Canada, current opposition leader Thomas Mulcair is not only the leader of opposition NDP party and minority leader of the Canada national assembly, he is also the leader of the shadow cabinet of NDP.
Remember that Hun Sen accused MP Cheam Channy as illegally trying to inflict the government as he was assigned by the Opposition Sam Rainsy Party to lead the shadow defense ministry. MP Cheam Channy was arrested and incarcerated by the government. He was named the prisoner of conscience in that time.
Actually, UNs failed to establish a sustainable democratic system in Cambodia especially the Political Party Institution in which many democratic countries such as Canada, Australia, UK etc. have fully endorsed official opposition to run their party effectively by giving them sufficient allowance and budget sponsoring by the state and let them conduct broader activities to effectively bring critics towards the status-quo government party leadership including establishing their own shadow cabinet to be ready for their future move. Those democratic founding fathers have well projected the national interest first, not the political party first in concreting the essential foundation of their nations.
Among the pillars of democratic principles to sustain its long term political institution, Cambodia opposition party CNRP should be endorsed to run their own shadow cabinet without receiving threat from the government party leadership at all.