Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Malaysia

Meredith Weiss, Meredith L. Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138312807
• eBook ISBN: 9781317629580
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Malaysia offers a broad, analytical survey of Malaysia. It provides a comprehensive survey of significant topics in Malaysian politics, economy, and society today, focussing on issues, institutions, and trends. It is divided into four thematic sections, which are all introduced by the editor:

• Domestic politics
• Economics
• Social policy and social development
• International relations and security

The volume brings together an international team of experts: an interdisciplinary mix of forty contributors from Malaysia and elsewhere, including many of the leading specialists on Malaysian affairs. The chapters included in the volume form an accessible and fascinating window onto contemporary Malaysia. They each introduce a different aspect of the Malaysian polity, economy, or society, offering both historical perspective and a current assessment or investigation. Designed for general readers and specialists alike, chapters may be read individually -- each stands on its own -- or conjointly.

Up-to-date, interdisciplinary, and academically rigorous, the Handbook will be of interest to students, academics, policymakers, and others in search of reliable information on Malaysian politics, economics, and society.

Part 1 Domestic politics

Overview

Meredith L. Weiss

As Malaysia achieved independence in 1957, deeply entrenched racial pillarisation and class stratification foretold a difficult political path ahead, despite a high degree of elite consensus. Indeed, Malaysia today is home to multiple visions and histories: as the chapters that follow detail, Malaysian politics is hardly monolithic. That variety comes through across states and regions within the country (e.g. the economic and cultural differences marking east and west coast, urban and rural areas, or peninsular and East Malaysia); across administrative levels, however much attention tends to focus on national, and secondarily, state-level, politics; and across subsets of voters, whether seen in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender, age, or socioeconomic class.

Bridget Welsh homes in on these distinctions in her chapter on elections in Malaysia. The lion's share of political discussion and research alike in Malaysia centre around elections, held and respected with near-unbroken regularity since independence, at both the federal and state levels. Yet however prolific studies of elections may be, they tend to hover at the elite level, on the one hand, and to characterise voters as though in homogenous (and especially ethnic) blocs, on the other. Recent studies have foregrounded other dimensions – from other social cleavages (religion, region, gender, etc., though notably, seldom class), to the role of state largesse and developmentalism, to the sway of media and messaging. Moreover, recent praxis in Malaysia has not only raised questions of electoral integrity, but suggested a turn toward increasing citizen engagement and empowerment. Even so, whether elections could usher in regime change remains uncertain.

In his chapter on political parties and coalitions, Ong Kian Ming engages with elections from a different angle. He notes that a combination of social structure as well as institutional legacies and advantages conspires to sustain the incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) and stymie alternatives. That said, the rise and solidification recently of Pakatan Rakyat (People's Alliance) as a coherent, seemingly cohesive alternative signals a shift to a two-coalition order, rather than a single behemoth versus disparate small challengers. Indeed, Ong suggests that the effective number of parties/coalitions (the real number of players) is, and long has been, right about two, taking into account initiatives for opposition coordination since 1990. Regardless, while Sabah and Sarawak have likewise shifted toward a two-party system, with local parties having lost ground there, patterns and issues on the ground have long differed between the peninsula and East Malaysia.

Our focus next turns to the elites within those parties, whom William Case deems increasingly testy, riven by both inter- and intra-party rivalries. Prevailing conventional wisdom, he suggests, tends to assume greater stability and cohesiveness than is borne out in fact. Separating out issues of elite relations and relative statuses from questions of regime (in)stability, Case forces a reassessment of patronage flows, elite pacts, and (sometimes sordid, bare-knuckled) contests. The fight, he notes, is at least as fraught within the single dominant party, given the spoils and status at stake, as it is between that party and its partners or rivals. While like Ong, Case notes shifts in these parties over time, he finds that what has changed is less the fact of elite fractiousness than the axes on which squabbling elites align.

We turn next to perhaps the most fraught of these axes, at least on the mass level – religion – with Joseph Chinyong Liow and Afif Pasuni's chapter on political Islam and Arnold Puyok's, on Christians’ political mobilisation. Liow and Afif note the entanglement of Islamism with ethnicity, on the one hand, and electoral pressures, on the other. While Islam has a long history of being central to Malay society, the parameters of Islamism in politics have shifted, as parties compete both within the Malay community and across ethnic lines; with the proliferation of Islamic civil society movements; with the rotation of key leaders as well as ideational currents; and with the ascendance of particular issues – for instance, recent tensions over questions of religious freedom. Arnold Puyok, meanwhile, notes the unduly little attention given to the role of the Christian Church and its leaders in Malaysian politics, despite their recent assertiveness. While that engagement has been driven in part by the rise of political Islam, coupled with apparent limitations on the space for and religious freedom of non-Muslims in the polity, Christian mobilisation – particularly in Sabah and Sarawak, given their larger proportion of Christians and different patterns of engagement – has its own distinctive issues and dynamics.

The next three chapters divide Malaysia by geographic and administrative level, rather than social cleavages per se. Francis Loh explores Malaysia's federal structure. The country's thirteen states have relatively little authority (although Sabah and Sarawak have greater, if diminishing, rights; see below), due to historical and institutional legacies, the lack of a clear demographic basis for state divisions, and political exigency. A combination of constitutional design and the evolution of political and economic processes over time has fostered a top-heavy institutional structure, now tested by the fact of opposition-led governments in a larger share of states since 2008 than previously. The federal government has taken steps, ranging from withholding resources to removing services from state control by way of privatisation, to prevent the transfer of financial resources or administrative authority to opposition-controlled states, but such tactics increasingly spark tensions even with BN-led states.

James Chin homes in on the most administratively distinctive states in that latter category, Sabah and Sarawak. He reminds us that these two states, while both firmly in the BN camp, differ not just from their peninsular counterparts, but from each other in important ways. The BN has essayed to solidify a similar sort of BN dominance in East Malaysia as on the peninsula, helped in that effort by (or in conjunction with) not just an increasing population share for Muslims over the past few decades, but also Muslim dominance in the state legislature and a ‘Muslim-first’ policy framework. Non-Muslim Bumiputera and Chinese have been politically marginalised, with little chance of change, particularly so long as the BN – now heavily reliant on East Malaysian support – remains in power at the federal level.

With Goh Ban Lee's chapter, we delve deeper among administrative strata, to the local government level. The balance of authority in Malaysia rests squarely with the federal government, not just vis-à-vis the states, but also local government. Particularly in the absence of long-since-abolished local elections, the role of local authorities has diminished and the lines between this level and those above have blurred. Distributional and other decisions are heavily tilted toward the federal government, even though it is state governments that create local authorities and appoint office-holders, and that otherwise retain significant authority over the local level. Moreover, problems of poor documentation, the opacity of procedures, and lack of both compliance with and enforcement of regulations has resulted in a lack of local government accountability and effectiveness.

Norma Mansor and Raja Noriza Raja Ariffin share some of these critiques, but take a broader view of Malaysia's public administration. They chart the stages of development of the public administration, from a hierarchical and stripped-down model under British rule, to an expanded and more hands-on developmental apparatus, to embrace of a neoliberal new public management framework, to more recent reforms. They note improvements to regulations and processes related to doing business, the greater inclusion of public input in policy-making, and continuing efforts to overhaul outdated or no longer adequate or germane institutions and processes, in light of changing priorities and economic conditions.

Finally, Anantha Raman Govindasamy homes in on a very different sort of politics: the recent efflorescence of hands-on, large-scale, extra-electoral citizens’ protests. He offers the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (BERSIH), Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF), and Pertubuhan Pribumi Perkasa Malaysia (Perkasa, Malaysian Indigenous Empowerment Organisation) as examples of an increasingly active, politically engaged civil society. While in the electoral realm, as Welsh details, ethnicity is still highly salient (especially in the cases of HINDRAF and Perkasa), Bersih in particular underscores the possibility also for multiracial initiatives. This spate of mobilisation, he suggests, is tied to electoral developments, including the relative decline of the BN and rise of Pakatan, but also is both the outgrowth and cause of citizens’ apparent increasing influence on government decision-making.

1 Elections in Malaysia Voting behaviour and electoral integrity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756240-1

Bridget Welsh

Of all the countries in Southeast Asia, Malaysia's elections have arguably received the most academic attention. Since the country received its independence in 1957, there have been thirteen general elections, regularly held within five-year intervals with the exception of the eighteen-month emergency period after the May 1969 racial riots. As elections have become highly institutionalised, the study of Malaysian elections has been a flourishing research area, dominating the discussion of politics. Despite the broadening of civil society and political contestation outside of the campaign periods, elections serve as defining points in the country's political history, be it the recent May 2013 and March 2008 polls or the pivotal historic 1955 and 1969 contests. By way of an example, less than a year after the 2013 polls, no fewer than three journal special issues, three books and multiple articles have been devoted to understanding the electoral process and outcome (Case 2013; Chin 2013a; Kee 2013; Khoo 2013; Ufen 2013; Weiss 2013; Welsh 2013, 2014).

This chapter looks at research on contemporary elections in Malaysia. The chapter is necessarily selective in its approach and coverage. The purpose is to draw together central themes and evaluate how elections are being understood, rather than to provide a comprehensive review. Attention centres on two important themes: voting behaviour and electoral integrity. This attention to political behaviour and the rules and norms governing polls reflects two comparatively recent threads in the studies of Malaysian elections. The focus is on national-level general elections (GEs).¹

The richness of recent studies lends considerable optimism regarding our understanding of elections in Malaysia. Our knowledge of Malaysians as voters has expanded, with increasing attention to different political identities and social cleavages. We also find that public attention to electoral reform has fostered in-depth research on how Malaysia administers elections and the impact of these administrative rules and procedures. As elections have become more competitive in the last decade, more attention is also centring on how elections may allow changes in leaders and policies. In short, we appreciate the multiple roles that citizens, campaigns, rules and institutions play in shaping electoral outcomes. Nevertheless, as will be developed below, considerable questions remain unanswered, not least of which is whether elections in Malaysia will offer its citizens the opportunity for regime change.

From elites to citizens: frameworks of voters and voting

With high turnouts, averaging over 70 percent since independence, it is fitting to begin with how voters have been studied. In two of the most comprehensive early studies on Malaysian elections, Ratnam and Milne (1967) and Vasil (1972) provide a detailed overview of the participants, parties and performance during the 1964 and 1969 GEs, respectively. These works set the standard for research on elections in their scope and richness and began a pattern that has occurred regularly in Malaysian scholarship – a focus on reporting on the election itself. The thrust of these initial works was on the winners and losers, allowing for resilience in these studies over time. One of the defining features of these early studies, however, was the largely missing Malaysian voter. The attention to the election primarily highlighted the elites participating in the process as candidates and their campaigns. Voters were largely missing ingredients in the initial analytical works, as an elite focus on interpreting elections emerged.

While a preoccupation with elites would persist in election studies – as it does in other analyses of politics in Malaysia – an appreciation of ordinary citizens would evolve gradually. Voters began to be framed as groups, primarily as ethnic communities. The dominance of ethnicity in Malaysian politics is a persistent feature in the analysis of voting behaviour, with the framing of ethnicity initially derived from the race-lin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Glossary
• A brief introduction to Malaysia
• PART I Domestic politics
• PART II Economics
• PART III Social policy and social development
• PART IV International relations and security
• Index