For decades, Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional (BN) was one of the world’s few dominant parties among electoral authoritarian regimes, and it stood out even more for its unique coalitional structure. These outstanding features attracted scholarly attention to explain such electoral dominance, including distribution of state largesse, authoritarian controls over media and public institutions, malapportionment and its resulting rural bias, and gerrymandering to alter the ethnic composition of the constituencies. BN’s cohesion and electoral strength derived from a range of factors surrounding its con-sociational model, patron-client relationships, and developmental quid pro quo of votes for projects.
Distributive Politics in Malaysia, by Hidekuni Washida, arrives at an opportune time. The fall of BN in 2018 and return to government within a loosely cobbled Perikatan Nasional coalition in 2020, underscore the relevance of systemic analyses. The doctoral thesis from which this book derives follows the long timeline of the Alliance’s, and then BN’s, two-thirds parliamentary majority for a combined half century—with the exception of the 1969–1971 emergency interregnum—from 1957 to 2008. BN’s loss of the two-thirds majority in 2008, and further erosion of parliamentary seat majority in 2013, added salience to the subject. As noted in the book’s preface, the 14th General Election of 2018 gave new impetus to look back on the BN’s long dominance. But Pakatan Harapan’s collapse in early 2020 renews interest in, and relevance of, research on the maintenance of power in Malaysia—even if the dominance and cohesion of eras past has been replaced by more fluidly forming pacts.
This quantitative study introduces original approaches and modifies previous research, striving to add complexity and nuance commensurate with the subject. Readers have much to imbibe from extensive and rigorous statistical analyses on public expenditures, cabinet appointments, and redistricting, as well as public opinion polls in Malaysia.
Washida makes a substantial contribution to the extant literature by investigating the role of resource distribution in electoral durability; he distinguishes his analysis by focusing on Barisan Nasional’s efficiency, the coalition’s ability to incentivize elites to undertake electoral mobilization without massive financial resources. The book also sets out to investigate conflict management within the ruling coalition and the decline of party dominance, notably the recurrence of intra-party leadership battles—within the BN’s hegemon, United Malays National Organizaton (UMNO)—which Washida argues, demonstrates the inadequacy of conventional approaches to distributive politics premised on elite-level discipline.
The book builds its conceptual framework around a theory of “elite-level mobilization agency,” presenting an insightful rubric that interacts two motivations of party leaders: buying off votes—especially where winning margins can be narrow—and dependence on the mobilizing support of elites. While the discussion is quite technical and applies a customized lexicon, non-specialists can, with some effort, grasp the underlying intuition even if the terms are foreign, and locate the study’s hypotheses within a theoretical context. Nonetheless, readers would benefit from a clearer presentation of the hypotheses, especially as they are repeatedly referenced in later chapters by a numerical-alphabet combination (1a, 1b, etc.) that is difficult to trace back to the theoretical chapter.
Among the insightful concepts is a four-quadrant matrix, with closed autocracy (based on inner circle loyalty and lesser need for elite mobilization) and electoral authoritarian regimes like Malaysia (characterized by incentivized support and higher dependence on local elites) in opposing corners. Washida also distinguishes different modes of leader-elite relationships, which can be cultivated by the leader through providing “career rents” (ministerial portfolios) and resources for mobilization (constituency funding), thus foreshadowing his argument that the literature lacks attention to the utilization of career rents.
The book also provides some instructive contextualization of Malaysia: an historical overview through the lens of mobilization agency, and a brief discourse on federalism, focused on “collusive agency” between central and state governments. These chapters offer informative and engaging discussions on development planning and expenditures, alongside the imperatives of rural development and its pacts on UMNO—especially the party’s centralization, which emerged in response to electoral setbacks. The bureaucracy also became increasingly politicized, and utilized as a distributive mechanism to rural Malay constituencies, as local elites became integral for filtering up development plans and for electoral mobilization.
The empirical portion of this book contains four parts, respectively focused on federal development funding, ministerial portfolios, malapportionment and gerrymandering, and the Asia Barometer Surveys. The author must be commended for assembling a voluminous data bank from myriad sources. Accordingly, the findings are extensive and distinctive.
Washida reiterates his departures from conventional approaches, including the argument that electoral results beget developmental reward. Integrating principal-agent aspects into the framework, he investigates the incidence of “[p]rospective commitment through impartial budget appropriation” (90), which arises from information asymmetries—i.e., the centre is unable to fully know local political conditions. The study finds impartial allocation for affiliated states (governed by BN). While higher vote shares for BN do not translate into more development allocation, there is evidence of conditional development funding disbursements. States that vote overwhelmingly for BN, for example, receive relatively more funding. Arguably, disbursement of party funding, instead of development expenditure, is a more pertinent outcome variable. Such data will be more difficult, and perhaps impossible, for longitudinal study to obtain, but the limitations—and advantages—of using development allocation could be more critically discussed.
The analyses of ministerial portfolios go beyond the simple outcome of appointments to a formulation of “portfolio bonus,” interacting portfolio shares with parliamentary seat shares. The chapter on redistricting deploys the author’s original GIS-generated data to provide finer-grained insights on the incidence and impact of re-delineation exercises, particularly in 2003. Public polls furnish data for statistically informing the electoral shock of 2008, the continual downward slide of 2013, and BN’s response—and some precursors to its defeat in 2018.
All in all, this substantive, meticulous, and incisive book will be a valuable resource in Malaysian political studies. Non-specialists may need to exert more to digest the material, but it will surely spur debate in select circles. The formalized and nuanced quantitative findings richly complement existing literature, and provide grounds for continual study—perhaps adapted toward understanding coalitional maintenance rather than dominance.
Hwok Aun Lee
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore