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How to Transform Malaysia’s Regime 257

citizens who voted against Pakatan). e incoming government announced
that Pakatan MPs would receive RM500,000 annually and opposition MPs,
RM100,000 (Augustin 2018)—an improvement over the BN’s denying
opposition MPs funds altogether, but still against the spirit of bringing
parliament up to a liberal-democratic standard.
A key step in restoring checks and balances will be developing a fairer,
representative electoral process. Electoral reform has been a core issue for
5
civil society since 2007, under Bersih —but now the government has the
opportunity and, perhaps, impetus not only to rectify irregularities in election
administration, but even to restructure voting rules, as Wong Chin Huat
details in his chapter (see also K. Tan 2018). Among potential reforms in this
domain are barring party-hopping immediately post-polling, clarifying the
process for constituting governments, and ensuring the Election Commission
is independent and reliably e cient in certifying results. ese measures
would help to avoid uncertainty at critical moments. For instance, in recent
years—and immediately following the recent elections—Malaysia’s monarchs
(the hereditary sultans in each of nine states and the king elevated from among
them), as well as Sabah’s counterpart governor, seemed to claim undue say
in selecting executives, contravening constitutional expectations, or have
been waylaid by legislators shifting sides and changing the balance of power
between parties (Harding 2018; Neo 2018). An Electoral Reform Committee
was formed soon after the election, with a two-year mandate. Administrative
adjustments are already underway, for instance to nomination-day procedures;
revisions to party- and campaign- nance rules, voter-registration and absentee-
voting procedures, and more are almost surely imminent. With bipartisan
support, too, Parliament passed a constitutional amendment to lower the
voting age from 21 to 18 in July 2019.
e second core area for institutional reform is Malaysia’s federal structure.
ree key prongs to this e ort are redistributing authority between federal
and state tiers, revisiting and renewing the agreements by which Sabah and
Sarawak joined the federation in 1963, and reinstituting local-government
elections.
Under the long stretch of BN rule, the central government usurped
greater authority over state governments than would otherwise be common—
although opposition gains over the two previous elections have already tested
the limits of federal-government say over state-government matters. Now, BN
and PAS each control two states, Sabah and Sarawak have their own Pakatan-
aligned coalition governments, and Pakatan controls the rest. is division
suggests that state governments may increasingly de ne their own pro les and

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