Click here to read more and to register for the event.

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, the talk broach three broad queries, with resonance well beyond Malaysia. First, the fragmentation and reconsolidation of Malaysian party politics to explore how party dominance transforms or collapses. Second, the extent to which its dominant party defined or confirmed Malaysia as electoral-authoritarian, and whether we should still consider it so. Third, 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.

Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science at State University of New York (SUNY), Albany. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her books include Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP, 2011); Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford, 2006); 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, forthcoming). She has also edited or co-edited eleven volumes, most recently, The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia (SUNY, 2019), and Toward a New Malaysia? The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath (NUS, 2020). Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Human Rights, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and other journals. Having worked previously at the East-West Center Washington and DePaul University before joining SUNY in 2008, she has also held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. She received her MA and PhD in Political Science from Yale University. Current projects include collaborative studies of urban governance and public-goods delivery, of civil society in Southeast Asia, of pandemic governance, and of democratic representation and political elites in Southeast Asia; and a monograph on Malaysian sociopolitical development.

Welcome!