Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
9-2023
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Ethnicity, Elections, Urbanization, Democratization, Authoritarian legacies, Malaysia
Discipline
Asian Studies | Political Science
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Democratization
ISSN
1351-0347
Identifier
10.1080/13510347.2023.2254707
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles
Citation
DETTMAN, Sebastian Carl, & PEPINSKY, Thomas B..(2023). Demographic structure and voting behaviour during democratization: evidence from Malaysia's 2022 election. Democratization, .
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3862
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.