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Towards a New Malaysia? 7

policies). Meanwhile, the technology of messaging and the possibilities for
self-categorization continue to evolve. New media magnify the di culty
of gauging the full scope of parties’ and candidates’ outreach and of voters’
decision-making processes (e.g., Ross Tapsell’s discussion here of candidates’
strategic use of WhatsApp to reach voters in their silos). We can approximate
identities and interests from electoral results, yet for now, such assessments in
Malaysia cannot avoid an ecological fallacy: the nest-gauged data we have are
at the level of generally age-de ned ‘streams’ in polling stations; without exit
polls, we cannot say for sure how any given voter voted. Coupled with our lack
of comprehensive and convincing data on how voters categorize themselves, or
the extent to which identity dictates interests among categories of voters, we
are left to fall back on assumptions. ese analytical dilemmas are clear for, but
clearly not unique to, Malaysia.
Second, the results push us to re-evaluate what sort of regime Malaysia
now has. Malaysia has long t the competitive electoral authoritarian model
(Levitsky and Way 2010), albeit with a recurrent, if not entirely consistent,
drift since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, toward a two-
coalition system. e e ective number of parties in the federal parliament
has not changed much since the last election, but who’s who in the rank-
order has been ipped—and the states stack up di erently. Also, promptly
after the election, Pakatan secured registration as a single entity (the BN-era
Registrar of Societies’ having denied the parties that unambiguous signal of
cooperation), but the parties within are more nearly equal in weight than in
the UMNO-dominated BN: should we assess them as parties or as a single
coalition? How should we take into account the di erent composition of
coalitions at the state level? And does the current system of more than two
preeminent parties in o ce—PAS retains a non-incidental role, and the
parties of Sabah and Sarawak seem unlikely to scale up beyond a potential
‘Borneo bloc’ for the time being—re ect instability, transition, or a
fundamental multipolar distribution of voters (recommending a shift away
from majoritarian electoral rules, as Wong Chin Huat’s chapter proposes)?
Lastly in this vein, given how heavily Pakatan has stressed plans to reform the
Election Commission, constituency malapportionment, and other features
of the electoral playing eld, what implications do those amendments have
for the number, alignment, and core bases of parties? In other words, what
represents the ‘natural’ state of this polity versus an artefact of electoral skew,
likely to fall away as the playing eld levels?
e chapters to come broach answers to these questions, from di erent
directions. And these answers matter not just for how we read Malaysian

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