Demographic structure and voting behaviour during democratization: evidence from Malaysia's 2022 election

• Main Authors: DETTMAN, Sebastian Carl, PEPINSKY, Thomas B.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Ethnicity; Elections; Urbanization; Democratization; Authoritarian legacies; Malaysia; Asian Studies; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3862; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5120/viewcontent/SSRN_id4427492.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Malaysia’s fifteenth general election (GE15) was a milestone in the country’s democratization process, with new parties and political movements competing with established political coalitions. In this paper, we investigate how Malaysia’s cleavage structure—a central feature of Malaysia’s prior authoritarian regime—shapes electoral competition in a newly competitive political environment. We find that the “race paradigm” (Milner, Embong, and Tham 2014) remains central to explaining party strategy and coalition behavior in GE15, but that more democratic competition has increased the salience of regional differences—both between peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia, and within peninsular Malaysia itself. Our analysis reveals the structural foundations of political competition in democratizing countries and contributes to the emerging literature on authoritarian legacies in such contexts.