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How to Transform Malaysia’s Regime 251

2018). (In the end, as Su an and Lee note, turnout reached a robust 82.1
per cent, only slightly lower than 2013’s record 84.9 per cent—suggesting
that most voters did travel, even midweek, and that pundits were correct in
predicting that urban and Singapore-based voters who balik kampung do tend
to be less loyal to the BN than are those who experience the party’s local
e orts.) One former BN MP complained that outstation voters, especially
those living overseas, are ‘as good as semi-phantom voters’: they do not know
him or what he has done for the community, even as the party continues
to focus on maintaining its local network. Politicians still work the ground
2
in much the same way as ever, but this secular demographic change means
personal ties and local patronage are likely becoming less e ective.
e fourth root cause of change is economics, and speci cally, the vagaries
of both transnational dilemmas and Malaysia’s own development. Malaysia
has experienced largely rapid, sustained economic growth since the 1980s.
However, distribution of that growth has been uneven. Although Malaysia
has made strong strides in terms of the UNDP’s Human Development Index,
approaching highly developed status, income and wealth inequality are among
the highest in the region (Lim 2005), and in ation and unemployment both
tipped upwards in advance of the election (Lee 2019). For 2016, for instance,
whereas GDP grew by 4.2 per cent, wages and salaries grew by less than 1 per
cent, while unemployment increased by 13 per cent; moreover, savings rates
were a perilously low 1.4 per cent in 2013 (Bhattacharjee and Ho 2017). e
Gini coe cient is lower now than in 1970, prior to the New Economic Policy
(from .51 then, it has declined as low as .401, in 2014), but holdings under
the state-run Employees Provident Fund reveal stark disparities between a tiny
group of the wealthy and the mass of those with inadequate savings. Also,
Malaysia’s low rate of absolute poverty changes with a slight adjustment to the
o cial poverty line—an implausible RM930/month per household averaging
4.3 members (Bhattacharjee and Ho 2017). Moreover, Malaysia invests less
than 5 per cent of GDP in social expenditures, far below the OECD average
of over 20 per cent (Bhattacharjee and Ho 2017).
Perhaps even more important in electoral terms is that perception of
unequal opportunities and of the pathologies of capitalism is endemic. O cial
statistics suggest improvements in household-level income inequality since
2000, yet public and even policy discourse suggest a worsening trend, in part
re ecting statistical measures’ overemphasis on income (Lee and Muhammed
2016). Government o cials had noted the seeming intractability of Malaysia’s
Gini index, stuck above .4, higher than its neighbours’, since the late 1980s
( e Star 2013).

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