2 - Against the Odds: Malaysia’s Electoral Process and Pakatan Harapan’s Unlikely Victory

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The outcome of Malaysia's 14th General Elections (GE-14) in May 2018 was an almost universal surprise, not least to its two main protagonists, incumbent Prime Minister Najib Razak and challenger Mahathir Mohamad. The source of Najib's confidence is clear: he inherited a vast political machine that consistently delivered electoral victories to the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and its coalition partners over Malaysia's six-decade-long independent history. Mahathir's doubts were likewise well founded: as one of the primary architects of that political machine during his two decades as UMNO president and prime minster, he understood well how grossly the odds were stacked against the party's challengers.

In its six decades at the helm of Malaysia's high-capacity state, UMNO strategically reshaped the electoral process in ways that reinforced its dominance of Malaysian politics. In doing so, it created a quintessential single-party dominant regime (Case 1996) in which elections were held regularly and contested by opposition parties, but were also biased to a degree that effectively prevented the transition of power. The electoral process, in short, was designed to prevent an outcome like Pakatan Harapan's (PH) unlikely victory in GE-14.

How the Mahathir-led PH coalition achieved this victory against seemingly impossible odds has already drawn significant scholarly attention. This chapter acts as a backdrop for those explanations by systematically examining the partisan bias in Malaysia's electoral process, including in the run-up to GE-14. In doing so, it provides comprehensive context for making sense of both UMNO's defeat and the myriad reform challenges facing the new government.

The first section of the chapter reviews Malaysia's institutional structure and electoral history. The second section brings Malaysia's electoral process into comparative perspective using recent data from the Electoral Integrity Project (Norris and Grömping 2017a). By these and other measures, Malaysia's electoral process was significantly more biased than other countries with comparable levels of development and institutionalization. The third section uses a theoretical framework from Birch (2011) to provide a structured overview of manipulations in each phase of Malaysia's electoral process. The final section briefly discusses the ongoing costs entailed by the electoral manipulations, including significantly impeding the reform process.