The Thai situation seems different, now that the king, who is 82, has been ailing.

“Thailand has essentially had a system whereby the Bangkok elite didn’t mind an upcountry government just so long as the Bangkok elite could decide when that government had to leave office,” said Karl D. Jackson, head of the Southeast Asia studies program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “From around 1992 down to 2001, there were weak coalition governments that were essentially pushed aside when they became too grotesquely corrupt.”

The system seems to have been permanently upset by the election of the now exiled tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001. Mr. Thaksin was the sort of charismatic populist that is sometimes generated by democracies, especially during periods of uncertainty. Mr. Jackson likens him to Huey P. Long, the Depression-era governor of Louisiana and later senator who was adored by his supporters but seen as a dictator in the making by his opponents.

The comparison with Mr. Thaksin seems very apt. He was, and remains, wildly popular among the rural poor who provided the foot solders for the recent Bangkok protests, but the Thai establishment saw him as corrupt, a blatant buyer of rural votes and a threat to the monarchy itself.

And so, what is commonly referred to as the Bangkok elite removed him from power in 2006, thereby setting the stage for the political stalemate that has lasted ever since.

“The fundamental problem of the Thai political system is that most of the money is in Bangkok and most of the votes are outside of Bangkok,” Mr. Jackson said, describing the impasse.

Is there a way out?

One possibility is that the two major factions in Thai politics, the Bangkok elite and the upcountry majority, can draw a lesson from the recent violence and moderate their behavior, though this might well mean, when the next elections are held, that yet another pro-Thaksin or Thaksin-like government will be elected.

“What the Thais have come up against is what the Brits came up against in 1832, when the aristocracy of Britain had to decide, ‘Will we enlarge the franchise to give people who are not like us some real power in society?”’ Mr. Jackson said. “The Brits made the right decision. Will the Thais make the right decision? Unless Bangkok finds a compromise method for sharing power, political instability and even violence may continue.”