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Towards a New Malaysia? 5

extent, but GE14 was by no means sui generis. It remains a revealing lens on
contemporary Malaysia.

Classifying Malaysia

An electoral upset, especially one after such sustained single-coalition
dominance, begs examination of what scholarship has missed and o ers an
especially apt spur to thinking more broadly about the theories and frames
we are using. Most studies of Malaysia tend toward exceptionalism—Malaysia
as in a category of its own. What can we say after the election about where
Malaysia ts among polities: how its institutions and outcomes compare, and
what this election adds to our knowledge of political structures and agents?
is election highlighted how familiar, near-habitual frameworks and
models continue to dominate discourse, notwithstanding Malaysia’s far-
reaching economic, demographic, and technological restructuring even in the
period of just over 20 years since Reformasi. For instance, slightly over three-
fourths of the population is now urban (Department of Statistics [2017]),
3
including a clear majority of the previously largely rural Malay population.
Moreover, the digital revolution has transformed everything from how
Malaysians receive information and mobilize when aggrieved, to how they
receive government payments (increasingly via direct-deposit rather than a
hand-delivered cheque).
e study of Malaysian politics has been in something of a rut for decades,
during which it has assumed an overwhelmingly communal pattern of political
identi cation and behaviour. In this model, Malays vote for ethnic privilege,
patronage, and feudal loyalty; Chinese favour economic rationality; and
Indians vote BN to ensure at least some representation. At best, studies nod in
the direction also of class politics, but still generally with an overarching ethnic
frame. And while readings of a developmentalist politics have long added
nuance to the academic literature (e.g., Loh 2003; Aeria 1997), conventional
wisdom and most scholarship still usually circle back to race.
First, we might consider how we classify voters in analysing voting behav-
iour and patterns. e dominant categorization has been in straightforward
ethnic terms: Malay, Chinese, and Indian voters support particular parties;
the patterns muddle in more demographically complex East Malaysia.
Communalism does shape Malaysian politics and culture in important ways,
these presumptions about ethnic patterns surely have at least some basis in reality,
and a straightforward communal logic has o ered a useful starting point over
the years in parsing patterns of electoral politics. Indeed, as the contributions
that follow make clear, we do see discernible patterns that track ethnic lines

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