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260 Meredith L. Weiss

party–business links, which not only raise parties’ stakes and distance their core
objectives from their constituents’, but also generate all-too-ready resources for
money politics (Gomez 2012). Taken together, e orts to reform Malaysia’s
political economy could not only help advance economic development over
the long term, but also broaden commitment to a political order less lubricated
by episodic, contingent dispensations in lieu of ongoing accountability.

Political Culture
Finally, the most challenging changes needed to further democratic
consolidation are to Malaysia’s prevailing political culture. Pakatan’s stance on
Malay privileges and Islam tends to steal the limelight here—and indeed, as
Ahmad Fauzi and Che Hamdan urge, Pakatan will need to develop a coherent
7
stance. Balancing majority and minority rights is key to Pakatan’s stability
and represents a shift from an increasingly Malay-centric polity under BN.
Pakatan relies upon interethnic vote-pooling (Ting, this volume): they do not
ignore ethnicity, but they cannot alienate any ethnic group. Toward that end,
as Horowitz (2018) describes it, the coalition, for instance, speaks of ketuanan
rakyat instead of ketuanan Melayu (the people’s rather than Malay supremacy)
and has avoided an exclusivist approach to Islam.
But consolidated democracy requires more than simple recognition of
minority rights. Despite how deeply civil society and social media permeate,
as described above, Pakatan still must do more to cultivate open debate,
institutionalise consultation, and sustain an autonomous public sphere. Post-
election initiatives such as a late June 2018 NGO-organised forum between
parliamentary backbenchers and civil society activists (Choong 2018) represent
steps in this direction. Yet the trend globally is toward state and private-sector
co-optation of political space—the condition of ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch
2004).
Also important will be curbing personalism in politics in favour of
evaluation on the basis of issues, including parties’ cultivating rather than
fearing new ideas and young talent. However much Mahathir and anointed-
successor Anwar orient politics around themselves, and however fraught
questions of succession and ‘camps’ remain (e.g., Ng 2019), both their parties
have far out-performed UMNO at advancing new leadership, even if, as Haris
Zuan suggests here, contemporary youth tend to be sceptical of party politics.
Yet the larger struggle will be to change how candidates woo votes. Already
some Pakatan politicians have tried to wean their constituents o over-
reliance on personal intervention and assistance. Still, less than one per cent of

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