ABSTRACT
In Malaysia’s General Election 14 (GE14), the long-time multi-party ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, led by the hegemonic United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), was surprisingly ousted by a gimcrack opposition, Pakatan Harapan (PH). This chapter engages with a “classic” literature on hybrid regimes and democratic transitions in order to better understand Malaysia’s “stunning election,” GE14. It also considers the implications that this election might hold for this literature’s theories of transition.
The analysis begins by placing Malaysia’s democratic experience in comparative context, highlighting its distinctive trajectory. It specifies the hybrid regime that Malaysia long operated in terms of electoral or competitive authoritarianism and single-party dominance. In GE14, this study records UMNO’s tightening of electoral manipulations and its extending of popular distributions, especially to rural constituents, factors that raised the bar that PH needed to surmount.
Electoral outcomes and their implications for Malaysia’s hybrid politics are collated in terms of Andreas Schedler’s notions of “regime-sustaining” and “regime-subverting” elections. Upon interpreting GE14 as a subverting event, a question arises over how much of its transformative impact can be understood as a process of “democratization-by-election.”
