Malaysian Politics and Government

The literature on Malaysian politics and government has been dominated for a long time by an approach perceiving the country as a “plural society” with a segregation of different ethnic groups or “races.” In this vein, many of the classic studies center around communalism as a legacy of British colonialism due to the immigration of ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians who became miners, rubber tappers, clerks, and traders, the colonial construction of “races” and parallel “protection” of Malays, and a politically toothless but symbolically valorized conservative Malay aristocracy. According to this theoretical framework, politics in the early twenty-first century is still seen as primarily shaped by ethnicity and communalism. Another approach examines the connection between politics and the economy. Historically, it forefronts the role of Malay radicals in the nationalist movement, and the existence of a strong labor movement as well as powerful leftist parties in the past. It tends to assess critically the New Economic Policy (NEP) involving affirmative action for bumiputera, that is, Malays and some other ethnic minorities except ethnic Indians and ethnic Chinese. According to this strand of the literature, the NEP has resulted in a political economy of state capture under the aegis of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), the dominant party in interethnic coalitions. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the political system became ever more authoritarian and marked by “money politics.” In connection to this, this literature stresses economic and status inequalities and often refers directly to some kind of class theory. In recent years, cultural and postcolonial studies are increasingly trying to deconstruct the notion of “given” ethnic, religious, and social identities. In parallel, new research subjects have arisen such as digital media, political Islam and religious revivalism, feminism, the marginalization of sexual and ethnic minorities, climate change, etc. Besides, a large part of the political science literature has focused on elections and political parties competing within a political system that has been characterized as electoral or competitive authoritarian or as a semi-democracy. Especially the Asian financial crisis and the emergence of the Reformasi or reform movement in the late 1990s have resulted in new political dynamics with the rise of a strong social movement and an opposition coalition that won in the 2018 elections. In the early twenty-first century, Malaysia is shifting in between electoral authoritarianism and electoral democracy.