Organizer:   Cornell Southeast Asia Program

Type/Location: In-person / Ithaca, New York

Description:

Malaysia’s 15th general election in November 2022 decisively ended the country’s dominant-party system. What might take its place, however, remains hazy—how competitive, how polarized, how politically liberal, and how stable an order might emerge will take some time to become clear. The opposition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), having secured a plurality of seats but with a sharply pronounced ethnic skew, formed a coalition government with the previously dominant, incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front) and smaller regional coalitions. This settlement resolved an immediate impasse but relied upon obfuscation of real programmatic, ideological, and identity differences, raising questions of longer-term durability or results. Examining this uncertainty suggests three broad queries with resonance well beyond Malaysia. The first is the fragmentation and reconsolidation of Malaysian party politics and how party dominance transforms or falls. The second is the extent to which its dominant party defined or confirmed Malaysia as electoral authoritarian, and whether we should consider it still to be so. And the third is what possibilities Malaysia’s apparent party-system deinstitutionalization opens up for structural reform beyond parties. Does the deterioration of that system—more than simply the previous dominant party’s electoral loss—clear the way for more far-reaching liberalization? All told Malaysia’s incremental dismantling of its dominant-party system does not also spell the end of electoral authoritarianism. Party and party-system deinstitutionalization leave the system in flux, but illiberal reconsolidation is as plausible as progressive structural reform.

Speaker:

Meredith L. Weiss is a Professor of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In four books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She is the inaugural Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series on Southeast Asian Politics & Society.

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