Electoral authoritarianism in Malaysia: trajectory shift

Abstract

This paper proposes an analytical framework by which to understand the origins, functioning, and dynamics of electoral authoritarianism in Malaysia. It thus explores notions of historical legacies, structural pressures, critical junctures, and institutional formation. But in guarding against teleology, it also considers elite agency and ‘stunning elections’. This framework is applied in the case of Malaysia because, in anticipating contemporary trends, the country has so long perpetuated a paradigmatic electoral authoritarian regime. And yet, with many countries growing similarly authoritarian today, Malaysia has suddenly become less so, with the government having been dealt a startling setback in its latest contest, held in March 2008, thus losing its extraordinary majority in parliament and control over five states. Hence, if democratization once again gains steam round the world, Malaysia may presage this trend too, with its electoral authoritarianism, long so resilient, perhaps poised today on the edge of transition.

Keywords:

• Malaysia
• electoral authoritarianism
• democratization
• critical junctures
• elites

Acknowledgments

William Case is Professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies and Director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include comparative politics, regime types in Southeast Asia, and elite analysis.

Notes

1 James Mahoney (2000: 513) identifies critical junctures as moments wherein path dependence coheres in the formation of new institutional arrangements. He argues that these ‘junctures are “critical” because once a particular option is selected it become progressively more difficult to return to the initial point when multiple alternatives were still available.’

2 Although Malaysia was hit less hard by the Asian financial crisis than Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea were, enabling it to avoid intervention from the International Monetary Fund, asset and currency valuations still plummeted. For a comparative analysis, see Haggard (2000), especially Chapters 2–3.

3 Dogan and Higley (1998: 20) define a political regime as ‘the basic pattern by which government decision-making power is organized, exercised, and transferred in a society’. And while acknowledging the many typologies of regimes that comparativists have constructed, they deploy the ‘most familiar and basic one’, encompassing monarchical, authoritarian, totalitarian, and democratic types.