Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020. xii, 271 pp. US$43.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-5004-5.
Two parties have dominated politics in Malaysia and Singapore for well over the past half-century: Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) has never lost an election in the country’s 56 years of independence, while Malaysia’s United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) has been in power for all but three of the past 64 years. That resilience is unique in the world and has unsurprisingly drawn attention. Casual commentators have been quick to focus on coercion and other repressive authoritarian tactics, as reflected in the “Disneyland with the death penalty” label that is occasionally cast upon Singapore. Without question, coercion has been part of the formula used to consolidate power in both Malaysia and Singapore, but it is far from the only part. As Meredith Weiss argues, the roots of that resilience run considerably deeper and encompass a spectrum of activities used by political parties to engage (and ultimately capture) citizens at the grassroots level.
Weiss premises her book on the observation that dominant parties stay in power through more than just coercive election-related tactics. Rather, parties like UMNO and the PAP use their myriad advantages to reshape the political landscape, including constructing dense party machines that effectively fuse party and state, and then providing grassroots level services upon which constituents (grow to) rely. The Roots of Resilience gives a nuts-and-bolts account of this process in action, from the runup to independence in Malaysia and Singapore through to the present. Three arguments give structure to the account. First, the space in which dominant parties operate is not static; rather, dominant parties use their power to reshape the regime more broadly, with implications for how all actors (including their opponents) operate. Second, dominant parties create machines at the local level which provide vital services to constituents, creating strong clientelist ties. Third, those clientelist linkages are personalistic in nature, which creates a sense of sustained, responsive, and mutually beneficial relationships that form the foundation of durable electoral-authoritarian politics. Similar arguments have been made before, but not at this level of granular detail. Ultimately, the book effectively shifts the typical focus on elections themselves to what happens in between elections. In doing so, it also spotlights the often-overlooked role of civil society in buttressing and challenging dominant parties.
The Roots of Resilience has seven chapters. The second surveys the landscape of writing on electoral authoritarianism and appeals for greater focus on the grassroots level, which tends to be either disregarded or underdeveloped in much of the literature. The third and fourth chapters take a historical-institutionalist approach towards tracing the pathways to independence and the electoral era in Malaysia and Singapore. The primary argument, substantiated through a detailed account of key pre-independence decades, is that larger political and security concerns hobbled the development of local governments and other local state institutions, preventing them from delivering much needed services. This vacuum was filled by parties who stepped in to provide such services, creating a form of machine politics that has endured through the decades, even as the initial political and security concerns have waned. The empirically rich chapters five and six give a granular account of that model, as manifested in the diverse policies and schemes UMNO and the PAP have leaned on to secure and consolidate grassroots-level support from a broad-based constituency. This is the empirical core of the book, and while the terrain it covers may be familiar to scholars of Malaysia and Singapore, the organized manner in which it is presented and the considerable detail into which it goes make it a valuable contribution. Readers less familiar with the two countries may have benefited from more explicit engagement with the comparison, but that is a quibble. The brief concluding chapter revisits earlier themes as well as key vectors through which regime change (as opposed to mere government change) might come about, though it ultimately (and perhaps appropriately) raises more questions than it answers.
From this follows the principal limitation of the book: through absolutely no fault of its own, its publication comes at a moment of dramatic political change within Malaysia, and perhaps (though certainly to a lesser extent) within Singapore as well, where a generational leadership transition has not followed the well-orchestrated patterns of the past. Weiss clearly differentiates between government and regime change, and thus even the fall of UMNO in 2018 does not in itself constitute a collapse of the regime UMNO created, particularly since elements of policy making and voter-politician linkages were retained by the successor governments. But the maelstrom and instability that have ensued since 2018, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and sharpened polarization, have clearly shaken the regime and quite possibly altered its essence. UMNO may continue to rule through its grassroots strength and legacy, but its ability to (re)shape the political landscape as it did in the past is almost certainly curtailed. What does this mean for the regime and its resilience? What does it mean for Malaysia’s everyday politics? What does it mean for the prospect and direction of reform? The Roots of Resilience provides a starting point for speculation, but if the roots that allowed for decades of dominance no longer function in the way they once did, scholars of Malaysia will need to revisit some of their assumptions as they feel their way through the altered landscape. Ultimately, that is more an observation of the moment than a critique of the book. “Roots of Resilience” makes an important contribution to the literature on Malaysia and Singapore by providing historical depth and empirical richness to the argument that dominant parties reshape the political sphere to maximize their advantages. It will serve as a useful reference point in navigating the increasing uncertainty that the dominant parties of both countries face in the years ahead.
Kai Ostwald
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver