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Towards a New Malaysia? 11

a democratic transition and what more needs to happen, beyond a change in
leadership, for a regime such as Malaysia’s to have liberalized.
Taken together, we hope these contributions not only complicate often-
studied and elevate too-little-studied dimensions of Malaysian politics, but
also suggest agendas for empirically interesting, theoretically relevant further
research. Whatever the causes of this recent election result, and whatever the
next general election may bring, Malaysia today is clearly not the polity it was
when the Alliance/BN rst took root in the 1950s, nor in its developmentalist
heydays of the 1980s–90s, nor in the increasingly polarized, patronage-fuelled
past decade. However optimistic for the possibility of a more representative,
accountable, participatory and equitable polity, we take GE14 not as a
clear harbinger of full-on liberalization in Malaysia—the actual extent of
institutional or normative change will take years to be clear—but more as a
clarion call, to spur deeper, more critical, more comparative research on what
we know about Malaysia and what this ever-intriguing polity suggests about
politics more broadly.

Notes
1 In Sabah, Warisan and the United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut
Organisation (UPKO) formed a coalition government with Pakatan component parties
Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, National Justice Party) and the Democratic Action Party
(DAP).
2 e same parties comprised the BA as PR, except that what became PKR in 2003 was
then two separate parties, Parti Keadilan Nasional (National Justice Party) and Parti
Rakyat Malaysia (Malaysian People’s Party).
3 Malays outnumber non-Malays in all but 6 of Malaysia’s 49 largest cities (see Ong
2015; also McGee 2011).
4 Malaysia has a secret ballot and no exit polls; as a result, beyond relying on pre-
election (or non-immediate post-election) surveys, analysts have little way of assessing
how individual voters voted. e structure of polling stations, with assignment to
saluran (ballot-boxes) structured by age, allows reasonably disaggregated age-cohort-
based analyses, as well as ethnicity- or religion-based assessments where the very-local
voting population is fairly homogeneous, but still not, for instance, reliable gender-
based analyses.

References
Aeria, Andrew. 1997. ‘ e Politics of Development and the 1996 Sarawak State
Elections’. Kajian Malaysia XV, no. 1&2: 57–83.
Aspinall, Edward. 2010. ‘Indonesia: e Irony of Success’. Journal of Democracy 21
(2): 20–34.

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