Elections, gambling and Malay unity

First-past-the-post (FPTP) elections turn us into political gamblers, as every election can be a do-or-die battle for our ethnic community’s survival.

Communalism: Demography? Cleavage? Political system?

Many people who complain about communal politics in Malaysia like to blame it on the ethnic composition, i.e. why the British brought in the Chinese and Indians in large number without an assimilation policy.

The more sophisticated ones would also blame it on the cleavage structure – a multi-ethnic society may not be bad, but we cannot have segregation, especially identification of ethnic groups by their economic functions.

The first position often leads to the rejection of plural society while the second position may point to the need to perpetuate the NEP policy paradigm.

Combining these two, we would have this fairy tale that Malaysia’s ethnic division can and must be overcome with “national unity”.

And you may soon hear a colourful version of that in the coming Umno’s AGM end of this month -- abolish the Chinese and Tamil schools, continue Bumiputeraism and Malay Supremacy, and we will have 1Malaysia.

Allow me to point to a third factor that influences communalism: political system, which decides how political power is to be obtained and exercised.

And by political system in a democratic context, political scientists normally point to three choices in system design: executive-legislative relations, centre-state division of power and electoral system.

The combinations from these three choices eventually decide on one thing: to what extent should power be concentrated in the hand of the national political majority?

Presidential Prime Minister

The first choice on executive-legislative relations asks if the government should be headed by a prime minister (parliamentarianism), an executive president (presidentialism) or both (semi-presidentialism).

By default of being a constitutional monarchy, we can only have a parliamentarian system, which is in theory more collegial than presidentialism. Prime minister is but “first among equals” of her/his cabinet colleagues and can stay in office insofar s/he enjoys the confidence of her/his parliamentarian colleagues.

In practice, the Malaysian prime minister is becoming more presidential, and not just in campaigning style. He controls not only the Parliament through archaic rules and powerful speakers answerable to him, but even his cabinet by concentrating power in the Prime Minister’s Department. For example, trains, taxis and buses are now controlled not by the Transport Ministry, but by the Suruhanjaya Pengangkutan Awam Darat (SPAD), which is answerable to him.

Centralised federalism

The second choice on centre-state division of power asks if the power should be centralised (traditionally it means a unitary state) or decentralised (a federation).

In theory, we are a federation but in practice we are perhaps more centralised than unitary states like Indonesia and Taiwan. State governments have little power and voters are penalised in development if they vote in a federal-opposition-led state government.

And local democracy which the British colonial government introduced in 1951, the Malaysian national government suspended it in 1965 and permanently eliminated it by 1976.

So, who controls the federal government, it controls the nation.

FPTP elections as gambles

The third choice on electoral system asks if the election outcome should be winner-takes-all (majoritarian) or fairly divided (proportional) or somewhere in the middle (semi-proportional).

The First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system is most majoritarian or winner-takes-all because if you lose, all the votes that support you are in vain – technically called “waste votes”.

And if there is a three-cornered fight, and the votes split almost evenly, then the leading candidate may win with just some 34% of votes, despite 66% of voters are against him/her.

For these reasons, FPTP elections are gambles. Your electoral fortune may change greatly with much smaller swing in votes.

Take Selangor for example, BN won 96.43% of state seats with 65.07% of votes in 2004. In 2008, BN’s vote share dropped to 43.80% by about 17.27% points, but it seat shared plummeted to 35.71%, or by 60.72% points.

The BN’s landslide in 2004 was of course the outcome of obscene malapportionment and gerrymandering in 2003.

But this is exactly why the game is scary – manipulations in redelineation merely amplify the gains of the winner. When the electoral mode turns against you, you become the victim of your earlier cheating.

When a change of electoral mode can translate a shrink in votes by a quarter (65.07% to 43.80%) to a plunge in seats by two-third (96.43% to 35.71%), now if this is not gamble, what is gamble?

Here comes the worse nightmare. Sometime, you need not even lose your votes to lose seats, if your opponents can close rank.

The Alliance’s defeat in 1969 has commonly been framed as its desertion by the non-Malays especially the Chinese. This was fuelled by two facts: the parliamentary seats won by the non-Malay-based Peninsula opposition parties rocketed from six in 1964 to 25 in 1969, while the Malay-based opposition parties jumped only moderately from nine to 12.

These figures hided the reality: the support for the non-Malay-based opposition parties in the Peninsula was almost stagnant at around 26% from 1964 to 1969 while that for the Malay-based opposition parties soared from 15% to 25%, by a whopping 10% points, which was almost the scale of the Alliance’s loss.

What happened? The non-Malay-based opposition parties in 1964 were divided, competing each other in 31 out of 102 constituencies. In 1969, they formed a pact to pose straightfights against the Alliance. And the strategy paid off.

How can the calls of 'Malay unity' disappear?

Now, consider these facts.

First, we have a presidential prime minister who can basically treat both the Cabinet and the  Parliament as rubber stamps, dictate most of the states and local councils to carry out his wishes, and punish those which are not aligned to him.

Second, he does all these in the name of lifting the ethnic majority, the core constituency of his party which mandates him his power.

Third, the electoral system will mercilessly punish him if he loses substantial support. (In 2013, he was lucky to win 60% of seats with just 49% of votes. It’s anyone’s guess how many seats he could have gotten had he retained only 43.80% of votes as Khir Toyo did in Selangor in 2008)

How can he and his party not play up the insecurities of the ethnic majority they claim to champion? How can they not call for Malay Unity to tear apart the nation?

In that sense, the more seats the Prime Minister can add to the Parliament, the more malapportionment and gerrymandering the Election Commission can carry out for him, the gamble just becomes bigger. He will likely win even bigger or lose bigger.

And when the stake is bigger, you expect him to be a more civil gambler?

No, this is not really because the Malay-Muslims constitute only some 55% of the population and hence their dominance is not secure. They feel insecure because they are the betting chips for their ethnic champions who are addicted to political casinos. – November 16, 2014.

* This column on the "1946 Question" will conclude by year-end. The author appreciates feedback, and can be reached at [email protected].

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.