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212 Wong Chin Huat

competitive politics, instability of permanent coalitions, and gender imbalance
and weak issue-representation. Methodologically, the analysis is based on a
longitudinal study of election data and party positioning.

Malpractice 1: Inter-state Malapportionment and an Expanding
Legislature
Malapportionment of constituencies entails the manipulation of electorate
sizes across constituencies such that some constituencies have substantially
more voters than others and su er under-representation, violating the ‘one
person, one vote, one value’ premise of democratic elections.
Because parliamentary constituencies cannot be drawn to span across state
boundaries, their malapportionment can be divided into two parts. e rst is
inter-state malapportionment, i.e., when national parliamentary constituencies
are not proportionally allocated among each of the states and territories. e
second is intra-state malapportionment, when the total number of voters
within a given state is not evenly divided across constituencies. In contrast,
malapportionment of state-legislative constituencies is only single-layered,
because their boundaries are not constrained by intra-state divisions.
Malaya’s original constitution in 1957 started with mathematics to
apportion constituencies at both the inter-state and intra-state levels. First, it
allocated parliamentary seats to states based on their shares of the electorate
and population. en, each state’s electorate was divided into the allocated
number of parliamentary constituencies, which were further divided into state
constituencies, with approximately equal numbers of voters. e allowed
2
deviation across constituencies was just 15 per cent from the state average
(Lim 2002).
Constitutional provisions for constituency delimitation were soon amended
three times, in 1962, 1963, and 1974. e 1962 amendment widened the
range of permissible deviation from 15 per cent to 33.33 per cent and shifted
3
the basis of comparison from the state average to the national average. e
1963 amendment deliberately introduced inter-state malapportionment
to underrepresent Singapore and overrepresent the Borneo states. As
recommended by Paragraph 19(2) of the Inter-Governmental Committee
(IGC) Report in 1962, allocation of parliamentary seats was no longer based
on demographics, but explicitly spelled out under Article 46:

Article 46 (1) should be amended to increase the number of elected members
of the House of Representatives from one hundred and four to one hundred
and fty-nine (including the fteen proposed for Singapore). Of the additional

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