Transcending 1946 (III): make politics more competitive, less volatile

Besides accepting our colonial past and embracing our multi-ethnic future, and delinking affirmative action from Malay-Muslim identity, the third thing we should do is reform our political system so that it can be more competitive, but less volatile.

Big Government for 'nation-building'

Big government is favoured by many Malaysians, not just the leftists who want to control and tamethe market, but even more so by many nationalists, from both the ethnic and civil strands.

Exactly because of our diverse population, a strong government is thought to be needed to hold the country together, from the communist threat during Cold War, Indonesia’s territorial ambition under Sukarno, communal conflicts and also separatism of Sabah and Sarawak.

The Sedition Act represents well the fear that “we will be in hell if the government is not reigning on us”. The act was expanded after the May 13 riot and is now to be reinforced again to further crack down on criticisms of Islam and Bornean secessionism after the abortive attempt to abolish it.

A powerful government is of course desired by ethno-nationalists and others who believe in assimilation as a tool to shape a national identity by force. For them, Malaysia should have modelled on Suharto’s Indonesia and Thailand to force assimilation on the Chinese and Indian minorities.

Thanks to the “nation-building” agenda, our federal system is more centralised than many unitary states. Financially, the Centre controls more than 90% of total governmental revenues and expenditure.

We have a powerful executive which makes both the elected lower house and appointed upper house of the Parliament its rubber-stamps, commands partisan loyalty of civil service and other state institutions, and curtails civil and political rights through draconian laws.

Judiciary independence was destroyed during Mahathir’s reign and executive power has since been gradually transferred from cabinet to Prime Minister’s Department, creating an apparatus of personal rule for whoever holds the UMNO presidency.

The inherently uncompetitive, anti-competition regime

As Lord Acton told us “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, corruption and power-abuse are expected from such excessive concentration of power. But the UMNO-BN system faces a more serious problem: Malaysia has elections and the dominant coalition has not found a way to stay in power by being genuinely competitive. In fact, because of this failure, it is inherently anti-competition.

It does not only suppress opposition parties, civil society groups and opinion leaders critical of the regime, who are invariably portrayed as extremists, trouble makers, public enemies, and/or foreign agents.

Within the ruling coalition, there is not a mechanism for component parties to compete and vie for parliamentary and state constituencies based on their popularity. Allocated seats are rarely taken away from under-performing parties, for the sake of coalitional unity.

At the component party level, party members get to indirectly choose only their national leadership, but not their constituency candidates, not least because some seats are allocated to other component parties.

Hence, those candidates chosen by the national leadership often may not be the most popular ones in their constituencies, but they will still win because of BN’s powerful machinery and electoral manipulations.

The BN resolves the inter- and intra-party rivalries over legislative candidacy by simply creating more legislative seats with every round of constituency redelineation, which is simultaneously useful to exacerbate the opposition’s under-representation.

Unfortunately, the ability to maintain its dominance without having its component parties and candidates to be most competitive only costs the BN in the long run. It easily grows disconnected and susceptible to shocks.

Electoral root cause of ethnic tension

When economic crises hit in mid-1980s and late-1990s, ridden by cronyism and factionalism, and UMNO split, all hell broke loose, not only for the regime, but also for the “privileged” ethno-religiousmajority.

The heightened anxiety amongst the Malays is caused by two things: the high stake described above and also the unpredictability of electoral outcome.

The First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) is notorious for electoral volatility as a small shift in votes can result inmuch greater changes in seats. 

A double-edged sword, the rampant malapportionment and gerrymandering in Malaysia amplify both BN’s victories and defeats, making electoral outcomes more volatile and unpredictable.

For example, in 2004, BN won 65.07% of votes in Selangor state election and all but 2 seats (96.43%) in the 56-member assembly. In 2008, BN’s vote share dropped to 43.80% (by 21.27% points), but its seat share plummeted to 35.71% (by 60.72% points).

In 2008, many voters just wanted to teach BN a lesson, but the lesson was so huge that the ruling coalition can be ousted with the defection of just 30 parliamentarians. While many non-Malays wereexcited to see an end to UMNO’s rule, many Malays were shocked and they regretted.

The post-2008 rise of Malay-Muslim ultra-nationalists like Perkasa and Isma is therefore a “rational” response of the insecure Malays to overcome their existential fear. (http://www.theinsiderarchived.com/opinion/wong-chin-huat/article/imagine-there-is-no-nep)

Only by making every other Malay feel under-siege, may they hope to stop the desertion of UMNO by Malays – especially of the younger generation and in urban areas who turn not only to PAS and PKR, but now even DAP.

So, be prepared for the ethno-religious tensions to continue until UMNO is ousted.

Even when that happens, continue to be prepared for the Pakatan parties’ bitter fight over seats like UMNO and MCA first did it in 1999, and identity politics will be a convenient tool to drive voters out.

Communalism won’t go away because like BN, Pakatan too does not have a mechanism to make intra-coalition competition productive.

Our political system must therefore be thoroughly reviewed. It is so highly winner-takes-all, making elections high-stake gamble, driving communal voters to see every election as a do-or-die battle for their communities.

Politics should be more competitive but less volatile.

Decentralisation

First thing first, we must decentralise governmental power, create more fields of contestation. We need to have not only more power devolved to the states, but also elected local councils and fully-elected Senates to represent the state interests.

With more power devolved from the Centre, Sabah and Sarawak should also devolve some power – for example, land, culture, language – to elected divisional government. And the divisions should have their boundaries optimally correspond to ethno-cultural boundaries of the native groups.  

Nationwide, we should aim to create many third-tiered administrative divisions (cities, districts, divisions) comfortably dominated by a substantial ethnoreligious majority, so the voters have no psychological need to echo slogans like Malay Unity or Chinese Unity.

Nested within the states dominated by another ethno-religious community, these relatively mono-ethnic administrative units will have no incentives to marginalise minority groups within their jurisdictions.

Intra-ethnic division is fundamentally necessary to build inter-communal and eventually non-communal coalitions.

Proportional Representation

Secondly, electoral outcome must become more predictable and less gamble-like by being more proportional.

Specifically, I would propose the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system used in Germany and New Zealand to replace our FPTP system. Voters would have two votes, one vote for the constituency MP and the other vote for their favourite party who can list their candidates on a party list.

By deciding the parties’ seat shares on their party vote shares, this ensures highly proportional representation, completely eliminating the need for malapportionment, gerrymandering, and voter transfer. 

We will likely have four to five parties if, like in Germany and New Zealand, political parties are required to win minimum 5% of party votes before being allocated any party-list seat.

These parties will likely have to form coalitions to govern, and are hence forced to be moderate. Since coalitions are more often formed only after elections, voters still have more choices than in a two-coalition system.

Parliamentary and party reforms

Thirdly, we need to empower our Parliament by transforming our parties to be “internally-made parties”, where party leadership is elected by their parliamentarians, rather than their delegates. Hence, party backbenchers can check their Party leader and his/her frontbench through party leadership election, denying the executive a powerful control of their parliamentarians.

Like in UK and Australia, there will be no room for any intervention of the head of state, or blackmailing by any “king-maker” ally.

We can further democratise the parties by letting party members choose their candidates for geographical constituencies, as well as those on party list.

From decentralisation, changing electoral system to reengineering political parties, these reforms are bold. But as Albert Einstein said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

End note

I thank readers for joining me in revisiting the 1946 Question and contributing their invaluable comments and critiques. I hope the exchange can continue after the end of this column. I am reachable at [email protected] – December 31, 2014.

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