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252 Meredith L. Weiss

A 2014 Pew study found sharply declining optimism among Malaysians for
their children’s prospects; nearly half saw inequality as a major problem (albeit
lower than the 60 per cent median for emerging or developing economies) and
nearly two-thirds (worse than the median value) saw success in life as determined
by forces they could not control (Pew 2014: 3, 7, 9). About equivalent shares
ranked ‘knowing the right people’ as equal to ‘working hard’ in their odds of
getting ahead (Pew 2014: 11). ‘Progress’, it had come to seem, however bene cial,
could not keep pace with rising costs of living for many or most.
e unpopular goods and services tax (GST), enacted in 2015, only
heightened many Malaysians’ sense of disadvantage: large numbers of citizens
who had never paid income tax before were now expected to subsidize a state
in which they did not feel themselves to be thriving. Pakatan’s framing the
GST as introduced by the government to compensate for losses to corruption
magni ed these e ects—even as Mahathir had personi ed headier days of
broadly rising tides, at an earlier stage of export-oriented development, two
decades earlier.
Simmering discontent translates into at least two vectors toward electoral
change. First, it brings into sharper relief questions of development priorities
or directions. Malaysia’s economy has been changing over the long-term, with
rising developmentalism and concentration of capital and economic power
not just in the hands of the wealthy few, but also in state- and party-linked
enterprises. It also has shifted inequality from being primarily inter-ethnic to
being even starker within communities: a 2014 World Bank study found that
within-group inequality accounted for 96.4 per cent of the total (Gil Sander
2014: 2). Such restructuring can be expected to raise interest in considering
other paths. Second, discontent may make even those who ostensibly bene t
from status-quo policies, such as Malaysia’s racially structured preferential
policies, increasingly receptive to change, even at the risk of losing what less-
than-adequate advantages they have.
Still, it bears stressing that the ways economic grievance plays out electorally
are not straightforward, considering the roles of a rmative action policies and
patronage in Malaysia’s system. Elsewhere, we tend to speak of ‘economic
voting’: that those whose personal economic position has declined since the
last election will seek to vote incumbents out. e racialized and particularistic
nature of Malaysian economic policies and praxis skews those calculations. If
one’s economic position has deteriorated, but the alternative might remove a
helpful interlocutor or communal privileges that help to blunt the pain, voters
may be less likely to risk seeking change (see Weiss 2019b). e net result of
this questioning of economic progress and direction, though, especially with

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