The Illusion of Declining Electoral Participation in Democratizing Malaysia

• In Event: Beyond the Traditional in Patterns of Political Participation

Abstract

Electoral participation appears on the decline in Malaysia despite reforms designed to strengthen its nascent democracy and boost participation. Yet the apparent decline in voting since the country’s watershed fourteenth general election (GE14) that ended decades of dominant-party rule is an illusion. Resulting from a reform-induced increase in the share of eligible Malaysians registered to vote rather than a decrease in their willingness to vote, the sharp reported drop in the national turnout rate between GE14 and the country’s subsequent fifteenth general election (GE15) is an artifact of using the number of registered voters as the denominator of the turnout rate. Using government statistical series to estimate the number of eligible Malaysians and construct turnout rates that more accurately measure participation since the country’s independence, this paper shows that eligible Malaysians not only voted in GE15 at higher rates than in GE14 but also at higher rates than in any previous election. These findings underscore the importance of attention to measurement as well as the effects of democratizing reforms for understanding electoral participation in new democracies and the autocracies that precede them.

Author

• Steven Matthew Oliver, Yale-NUS College