The Economics of Winning Malaysian Elections and Party Machinery
Understanding political culture and its economic lubricant as crucial structural obstacles to positive change, particularly through electoralism and political institutions in their current form.
As the 15th General Election was called in Malaysia on 10th October, there will be a swirl of discussion about who will win which seats and which parties will come out on top in this — seemingly important but not always perceived as fair — contest. Public and media discourse will likely focus on what kind of coalitions could be formed — will it include UMNO? Will it be a majority-Malay combination again? etc. What tends to get lost in the buzz around who is winning what and where, is what it takes to win, and more importantly, how seats are won. The common answer to this question is money as the concept of ‘electoral carrots and sticks’ — vote-buying and withholding resources — is very familiar to a Malaysian audience.
Less discussed in mainstream public discourse are the implications of this open secret, namely why monetary resources are so necessary for political parties, for both their local day-to-day operations and periodic elections, and why this is the case. Most recently, referring to the upcoming general election, Mahathir predicted that UMNO has “a good chance of winning because they have a lot of money”. The long rule of UMNO and BN has created a ‘clientelist’ political environment and developed voter expectations of municipal-level constituency service which can only really operate with large amounts of financial resources — often far beyond the formal allocation and salaries of political representatives. Drawing heavily on a recent book by Meredith Weiss (Roots of Resilience, 2020) — a study based on more than a decade of fieldwork in Malaysia and Singapore, this essay attempts to draw out the political consequences of what she describes as ‘authoritarian acculturation’ — “the process by which citizens become acclimated over time to a particular mode of politics, conditioned by the nature of competition and the structure of both political parties and civil society” (1). The essay will argue that beating UMNO-BN at their own game is exceedingly difficult because they have had more than 50 years to set the rules of the game. Not just institutional consolidation in the executive branch of the government — in addition to rigging the game through gerrymandering and malapportionment — but shaping political culture to their advantage. More than just the state and political forces, this deep-rooted and widespread political culture is ultimately what liberals, progressives and even socialists are up against if they want genuine change through elections. Without addressing it, one’s political project would likely be trapped in having to partake in corruption or finding itself rapidly losing ground to better-resourced opponents.
Political Culture in Malaysia
BN’s uninterrupted control of the state apparatus — distinct from just the government which is more associated with political rule — and the hegemony to restructure our political economy had long-standing consequences for the way in which voters see politics and the role of politicians in society. Its abolition of local council elections has allowed politics to be structured around the delivery of municipal functions and constituency service. In addition to helping out with financial needs, scholarships and just solving the problems of individuals or groups within the constituency, politicians were expected and rewarded for showing up to weddings, funerals and cultural events. (2) These acts generate loyalty at the individual and sometimes party level as the ones responsible for getting them out of a pinch or improving their lives rather than the state.
Beyond the simplicity of outright vote-buying, especially when elections come around, Weiss paints the picture of the Malaysian voter as rational, responding to long-term development projects over one-off benefits offered by politicians. However, what this does is create the incentives for politics to be hyper-local and sometimes subnational rather than national. Polling data from 2016 confirmed this to a large extent such that the expectation of MPs’ and ADUNs’ role as lawmakers was virtually non-existent. Instead, voters wanted to see them “serving the people” and “going down to the ground”, and politicians themselves from both sides of the political aisle are responding to this expectation. (3)
Over the many decades, Weiss notes that opposition parties adapt to and begin adopting this mode of politics, competing with UMNO-BN in an attempt to deliver more or better municipal services in order to win political office. When Pakatan came to power in the Selangor and Penang state governments, and later the Federal government, it massively increased the allocation of constituency development funds for its ADUNs and MPs, to be used for “concrete, visible, loyalty-building purposes”. Earlier attempts by opposition parties at more anti-establishment and performative substitutes for clientelist goods have given way to replicating the machinery mindset of UMNO and BN as these parties gained control of state government and access to its resources. Despite the increased competition from the opposition, BN, its allies and UMNO splinter parties, both sides now seem to prefer and indeed know no other mode of politics aside from this form of clientelism that has defined Malaysian politics since our independence.
The counterpoint to this argument about machine politics is, of course, GE14 in 2018 where the opposition came to power by virtue of appealing to the discontent of the rakyat and triumphed over BN’s machine politics. This populist upsurge was strong enough to remove UMNO but could not be stabilised to see out a full term. Given Mahathir and Pakatan’s constant hounding about debt levels and their imposition of austerity on some sectors, voters may have sought a return to a time when they were taken care of. One could interpret – though tough to prove decisively without specific polling data – the recent victories by UMNO-BN in the states of Sabah, Melaka and Johor as a possible return to the salience of machine politics. One only has to read Serina Rahman’s revealing but sensitive article on rural voters in Johor months after GE14 to get a glimpse of why this return has been underway.
The Role of Money, the State and Businesses
While some of these forms of politician-voter engagements may be more affective or emotional rather than monetary or material, one thing becomes absolutely clear, money is needed to sustain these ‘political activities’ which are essential to get elected and re-elected in many parts of the country. Money would be used to sponsor events, fund societies and local groups and organisations, as gifts during weddings and funerals, and given to individual constituent members in need. At an administrative level, money is needed to fund staff to manage constituency service, subsidise the activities of local leaders, pay the salaries of party branch staff, if any, and run the day-to-day of political office. As Weiss notes, running service provision at this scope and scale “entails substantial organizational costs, however dependent it is on ideologically committed activists willing to engage long term, for minimal remuneration”.
Outside of these local-level costs, there is also what it takes to run a functioning party. A massive party like UMNO has over 3 million members — which it oddly collects a lifetime membership fee of only RM2 from, 191 divisions, over 20,000 branches and possibly more subbranches at the village level. Running each of these state-level and district-level divisions, branches and subbranches require funds for staffing and activities. Even if other mainstream opposition parties were one-tenth or one-hundredth of its size and collects regular membership dues, they would still demand massive financial resources. A central party apparatus would also need staff for administration and research, would have to pay for party events and fund new divisions or branches. All this is just to say, politics is an expensive enterprise in Malaysia.
Where the money used for these purposes comes from is, again, obvious to a Malaysian audience. The media has regularised reporting about political appointments to the boards of GLCs, investigations into cases of bribery or misappropriation, and outright corruption. Since the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), greater state intervention and, indirectly, political involvement in the economy has provided a variety of avenues for patronage and corruption. Reading between the lines, the various parties that struggled to form the Muhyiddin and Sabri administrations were jockeying for resources for their individual party. The intensity of these public feuds and tussles signal their desperate need to maintain their party machinery, in addition to retaining the comforts and luxuries they and their families have become accustomed to as officeholders.
Drawing on a Transparency International Report from 2010, Weiss rightly notes that “all Malaysian parties rely on ‘covert funding’”(4). Pakatan parties, even before coming to power in GE14, were engaging in the practice of political appointments to state GLCs they had control over. Terence Gomez and a team of researchers lay out the scale of this phenomenon across both Pakatan and non-Pakatan states. (5) Aside from this, parties would receive kickbacks from big capitalists and tycoons who benefit from their cosy connections to federal and state politicians who have discretion over development projects. More established parties such as UMNO, MCA and MIC have party-owned corporations to bolster their political war chests in full view of the public while leaving other parties would have to resort to more opaque means of raising funds. (6)
Who Does This Matter To and Why?
Despite how apparent these things may seem to any discerning Malaysian, there are still many — mostly urban liberals — who operate as though policies, principles, fixing this or that particular political rule or institution can act as a silver bullet for social change. To them, I make the following appeal.
To those who think policy and principles matter for election: In most constituencies, taking a morally right position, the most thought-out policy stance, or a combination of the two will translate to very little by way of support, let alone be sufficiently urgent to win an election, if one’s message has no immediate relevance to voters’ lived reality. The effects of ‘authoritarian acculturation’ would mean that voters are far less likely to respond to such programmatic appeals. (7) And who can blame them? Relatively few voters have ever experienced support for a candidate translating into a victory that benefitted the wider polity. Any benefits these voters have seen as a result of national policy were initiated by political elites without any democratic input from them. Furthermore, calls for cuts to subsidies and an end to wasteful government programs in the name of fighting corruption will do little to persuade those who already pursue precarious and uncertain livelihoods. A section of voters may rightly see that party machinery – however dirty and corrupt it may be – remains a vital safety net for them and their community. I fear too many activists and pundits who are involved in policy discourse ignore machine politics as a factor in voting patterns and thus, the path to institutional change.
To those who think you can win elections and run constituency service without illicit funds: One would face a real uphill battle to resist the temptation of corruption in order to win, whether for a social cause or for a particular community. Even NGOs who fight for a single cause and sometimes have a smaller group of stakeholders require a team of staff and a steady flow of funds to run sustainably. It is far-fetched to think one could do otherwise for a political party. Discussions about fixing the regulation of political financing are not new but a complete overhaul of the electoral system and its rules do not seem to be on the cards as both sides of the political elite feel no urgent need in seeing this changed and continue to reproduce the idea that this is how politics is done now and in the foreseeable future.
What next?
This essay is by no means an indictment or frontal assault on ‘money politics’ in a very broad sense. Patronage and clientelism as a form of politics can be responsive and even highly inclusive. Yet, what one might want in a political program is a guarantee of welfare at the state or federal level with no opportunity for political mediation and bargaining through elections and municipal politics. Left-wing leaders across Latin America used resource rents from oil and minerals to create national welfare programs and development initiatives that have lifted millions out of abject poverty. In turn, these leaders have become wildly popular among their electorate who rightly sees them and their parties as responsible for the improvement of their miserable material conditions.
Patronage and clientelism are by no means unique to Malaysia. Our neighbours in the region – also labelled “flawed democracies” among other similar terms – also see its occurrence despite their different political systems. (8) In Malaysia, machine politics stand in the way of meaningful change if one is looking for both political democracy and economic democracy as it keeps the terrain of struggle hyperlocal and prevents greater solidarity over national issues. The task at hand to break out of this cycle of machine politics is a difficult one, to change the political culture, whether from inside the state — being in government — or outside.
The solution to this task will heavily depend on one’s attitude towards electoralism. If one is committed to it as a strategy, one would need to be sober about the fact that changing political financing laws will not change the way elections are won. Political actors and economic interest groups will merely seek ways to further obstruct sources of political funding or find ways to formalise it within the economy. In the US, corporations are allowed to give unlimited campaign donations and donations to political action committees (PACs) under the 2010 Citizens United ruling, opening the door for greater corporate influence and reduced transparency. Attempts to overturn the ruling has had little success as corporation spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy influence with politicians. In a country like Malaysia, where the separation between state, party and business is heavily blurred, it is doubly tough to picture political financing laws so airtight as to slow the churn of machine politics, let alone abolish the practice.
The real fight that needs to be won is over the current configuration of state, political and economic institutions that allow for the reproduction of authoritarian acculturation and its incentives. The replacement of Malaysia’s first-past-the-post single-member district with a party list proportional representation system at the MP level would change the incentives for MPs to legislate instead of delivering constituency service; more independent and democratically accountable mechanisms to police political appointments to GLCs and statutory bodies; the reintroduction of local council elections; and, universal social protection at the federal level to prevent gaps in welfare for political exploitation. These are just some examples of the minimal changes needed to address the cycle of acculturation taking place. The contradiction is then that one has to be in power to fix this ‘corrupt’ state of affairs but one would have to be corrupt – and likely partake in machine politics – to gain power in the first place. It seems that if one chooses the electoral path to change while actively avoiding the temptation of machine politics, a more concerted effort to change political culture is needed before one can even consider entering political office — for fear of corrupting one’s cause to stay in office. I will not claim to have the answer to this dilemma. Dr Weiss suggests that civic education programs are beginning to erode this acculturation but I am far more sceptical that it will reach critical mass in our lifetime at the current pace and in the present political-economic conditions. Political creativity and innovation in terms of strategy and navigating the state will be needed to resolve this contradiction at the heart of Malaysian politics.
Originally published in Jentayu.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go out to Charles, Kok Hin and Zikri for their detailed comments, and to Daniel for our very generative conversations leading up to writing this essay. Any faults with the essay are entirely mine.
Notes
(1) Also see Weiss’ talk discussing her book on YouTube.
(2) Weiss expands on the early history of UMNO machine politics and the role of the JKKK as “party-aligned village-level governments” in Chapter 3 of her book.
(3) Excerpt from Weiss, 2020: Polls suggest the extent to which these efforts define politician-voter linkages as clientelistic: the extent to which constituency service is not just something politicians do as a matter of course, but what determines Malaysians’ assessments of legislators and tempers their vote choice. A June 2016 national survey found that the activity respondents most commonly ranked their first priority for ADUN was serving the people (19 percent), followed by going “down to the ground” (15.5 percent). No one ranked “lawmaking” first; only 0.7 percent ranked it second. MPs fared similarly: 0.4 percent ranked lawmaking first; the greatest share, 22.7 percent, prioritized “taking care of local constituents who need assistance,” followed by going “down to the ground” (16 percent). 137 MPs’ own survey responses, too, indicate usually greater concern with how they appear to their immediate constituency than to the broader public or as national leaders. Many care more about their service provision than their legislative role, even when they fault local authorities for requiring them to take on tasks that pull them away from policymaking (Loh and Koh 2011, 61; Koh 2011, 81–83). Moreover, the majority of Malaysians see political leaders as “like the head of the family” (Welsh, Ibrahim, and Aeria 2007, 17).
(4) See pages 81 to 84 in Reforming Political Financing in Malaysia, Transparency International-Malaysia, 2010.
(5) See Part 2 of the Malaysia GLC Monitor 2018. where the researchers expand on state-level GLCs and political directorships in Selangor, Penang, Kelantan, Perak and Johor.
(6) See pages 98 to 101 of Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development by Mushtaq H. Khan and Jomo Kwame Sundaram on the resource flows between politicians, the bureaucracy and capitalists; Political Business: Corporate Involvement of Malaysian Political Parties by Edmund Terence Gomez on party-owned corporations; page 113 to 114 of Political Party Finance Reform in Southeast-Asia on “shadowy sources of income”.
(7) This dynamic could be said to be different in urban spaces where access to non-partisan public goods is higher and livelihoods are more individually centred or depersonalised rather than communally so.
(8) See Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia by Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot; and Strong Patronage, Weak Parties: The Case for Electoral System Redesign in the Philippines by Paul D Hutchcroft.