The 2008 Federal Elections in Sarawak: A Note

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 8 March elections, Sarawak was cast as an outlier, recalcitrant even, to the perceived ‘revolt’ against the incumbent Barisan Nasional. This short note attempts to show that Sarawak actually fell within the overall voting pattern viewed in its total range, rather than in summary outcomes. In that context, the note then attempts to argue that the voting patterns can be accounted for by local reasons, hopes and fears, particularly in the case of the minority indigenous groups collectively categorised as ‘Other bumiputera’. However, Chinese and Malay constituencies exhibited a pattern clearly correlated to ethnicity.

Key Words:

• Malaysia
• Sarawak
• elections
• ethnicity
• Orang Ulu

Notes

1. Nationally, Malaysia has a policy favouring bumiputera or indigenous peoples, broadly classed as those present before the arrival of the European powers. The proximate justification for it is the relative economic distance between the bumiputera and those whose ancestors arrived as immigrants, in particular the Chinese, although it has been articulated as an entitlement of indigeneity.

2. The Reynal-Querol (RQ) Index, but calculated on three groups rather than two. The index ranges from zero to unity. It is essentially the Esteban–Ray Index (Esteban and Ray, 1994), without the distance metric. See Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2003, 2004). Although as a ‘polarisation’ index it may serve to explain civil wars, in the Malaysian electoral context it might be more useful to think of it as a measure of the degree of ‘mixed-ness’ of a constituency and, in the mean, of the constituencies in a state. Thus, half a century ago the application of the index to electoral constituencies in the country would probably have a lower figure for most constituencies, given the spatial separation of the population, hence a lower mean by state. As Brown (2008) shows, over time the Barisan Nasional, to its credit, has been able to seize the ‘middle’ ground, i.e. the ‘mixed’ seats, namely those seats with a high RQ, ‘polarisation’ Index. The Barisan Nasional ‘collapse’ of 2008 in the Peninsula was precisely its erosion in those ‘mixed’ seats, coupled with its collapse in those ‘non-polarised’ seats that were heavily non-Malay, and its erosion in those ‘non-polarised’ seats that were heavily Malay. The problem with the RQ Index is that only relative population proportions matter, not the degree of internal cohesion or the extent of inter-group distance (see Permanyer, 2008).

3. The Sabah median was 0.825.

4. Some might argue that it is more ‘monetised’ than ‘ethnicised’. Although what is called ‘money politics’ is a factor, this, too, should not be seen in a patronising fashion as a reflection on the ‘idiocy’ of the, especially rural, voter. Rather, it should be seen as figuring in their own calculations of the meaning of elections and what they can hope to effect by it. On the other hand, all too often the funds supposedly intended to ‘buy’ voters ends up elsewhere than the hands or pockets of voters.

5. However, despite some analyses on the centrality of the alternative internet-based sources (see e.g. Zawawi and Tan, 2008), even the concessions by Barisan Nasional politicians that they lost the cyber-war, polls by the Merdeka Centre (http://www.merdeka.org) consistently return a small minority citing those sources as their first source of news, the vast majority citing the mainstream print media and television. Perhaps the more critical factor is the level of distrust there is in the mainstream media, i.e. people discount much of what they read or watch. This does not mean that new media are unimportant, far from it, just that their role in 2008 remains uncertain.

6. A simple least squares fit of percentage vote for the Barisan Nasional to proportion of Chinese in the constituency returned an adjusted R-squared of 0.54 with a parameter value of −0.37 (t: −5.52).

7. In response to queries as to what they think would be an adequate household income, many return a figure between RM3,000 and RM5,000 a month. The mean household income in Sarawak in 2007 was RM3,350 (Malaysia, 2008), and by previous patterns this suggests a median of around RM2,500. See Table 1 for 2007 mean salaries and wages.