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18 Ibrahim Su an and Lee Tai De

(National Trust Party, Amanah), which subsequently became a part of the
revamped Pakatan Harapan opposition coalition. In 2016, UMNO factions
that lost out in a power struggle against Najib Razak left the party to form
Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Malaysian United Indigenous Party, Bersatu)
led by Dr Mahathir and former deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.
And in Sabah, ousted UMNO vice president Sha e Apdal left the party to
form Parti Warisan Sabah (Sabah Heritage Party, Warisan). e splintering of
these large parties sapped the strength of the parent party and contributed to
its defeat in the 2018 general election.
is chapter seeks to explain the electoral outcomes of GE14—speci cally,
which segments of the electorate voted for PH, who stayed on in support of
BN, and what explained the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS)’s better-than-
expected performance. We focus particularly on patterns of ethnic electoral
support, arguing that ethnicity alone, while a salient indicator, is an inadequate
predictor of voting behaviour, being crosscut particularly by age and location,
as well as by individualized support for particular leaders.
Our study relies on Gary King’s (1997) ecological inference model. is
model helps to determine electoral preferences from speci c demographic
pro les, including such factors as gender, age, and ethnicity, using aggregate
data. Complementing the aggregate data for this study are polling-stream
(saluran, i.e., within-polling-station) level electoral data. For GE14, the
Merdeka Center successfully collected data from all 22,933 polling streams in
165 parliamentary districts in Peninsular Malaysia, categorized into six age-
demarcated cohorts. To get accurate estimates of ethnic electoral support,
1
we combined each polling stream’s results with electoral-roll (daftar pemilih
induk, DPI) data. e same method was used to calculate polling-stream level
results for the 2013 general election (GE13), which we use as a comparison.

Background to Malaysian Electoral Geography
Malaysian parliamentary constituencies roughly re ect the demographic
composition of the country, but more critically, they underpin the realities of
power-sharing among the major ethnic groups that make up the population.
Since 2006, and up to the 2018 election, the electoral contest has played out
across 222 parliamentary districts, of which 165 are located in Peninsular
Malaysia, 26 in Sabah, and 31 in Sarawak.
ese districts can be classi ed by their dominant racial pro le: 119 Malay,
29 Chinese, 38 Sabah and Sarawak Bumiputera, and 36 mixed ethnicity (see
Table 2.1). In classifying districts by ethnic type, we include any district in

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