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Malaysia will hold its 14th general election before August 2018, bringing renewed focus on the nature of political competition in the country. This paper provides a systematic overview of the electoral process and an assessment of how it shapes the country's political environment. Political competition in Malaysia is extensively manipulated to provide the incumbent government substantial advantages in elections. Most of the manipulations are a result of institutional bias during the pre-election phase. They create a fundamentally uneven playing field that has entrenched the political dominance of the UMNO-led coalition. Electoral manipulations impose numerous costs. These include direct costs like the inefficient allocation of resources, as well as indirect costs like the exacerbating of ethnic divisions. Both channels hinder Malaysia's efforts to reach further developmental milestones. The high degree of electoral manipulation in Malaysia, juxtaposed against its successful developmental record and relative social stability, makes the country an important case for the growing body of research on electoral integrity and malpractice.

This dissertation examines how states actions shape the effects of ethnic diversity. Specifically, the three constituent chapters demonstrate the ability of public policies and political institutions in Singapore and Malaysia to alter key aspects of inter- and intra-ethnic interaction among their respective populations. The findings provide evidence for the extensive role that political activity plays in how ethnic diversity manifests itself across a range of contexts. The first chapter examines the impact of Singapore's National Service program on the ethnic and civic identities of conscripts. It isolates the effects of the program by exploiting a natural experiment that introduces exogenous variation in the intensity of socialization and contact between conscripts of different ethnicities. It finds that conscripts exposed to higher levels of socialization and contact demonstrate higher salience of potentially unifying civic identities and lower salience of potentially divisive ethnic identities. These effects are remarkably durable, as they remain observable in former conscripts who completed their National Service decades ago. The findings demonstrate the significant potential of public policy to shape patterns of inter- and intra-ethnic behavior through socialization and inducing contact between citizens. The second chapter examines the impact of Malaysia's electoral rules on the politicization of ethnicity. It demonstrates that the country's dominant political party has sought to secure its grip on power through the use of malapportionment, which concentrates electoral influence in a relatively narrow segment of the electorate. The disproportionate importance of this group to electoral outcomes has led the government to maintain policies that ensure its support--in this case, policies that increase the salience of ethnic divisions--despite their deleterious effects on national cohesion. The chapter provides insights into why ethnically divisive policies and rhetoric are deeply entrenched in Malaysia. The third chapter examines the impact of Malaysia's divisive policies and highly politicized ethnic cleavages at the micro-level. Using survey experiments, it demonstrates that the state's actions, together with inherent ambiguities in the Malay identity, have fundamentally altered the nature of the Malay ethnic identity by imbuing it with an explicitly political component. Two surveys provide evidence that large segments of the general population use political affiliation in their ethnic categorization of self- identifying Malays. This finding makes two important contributions. From a theoretical perspective, it challenges existing conceptualization of ethnic identity, which assume that only descent-based attributes are used as criteria for ethnic group membership. From a practical perspective, it demonstrates at a micro-level how politicizing ethnic identity can increase the intensity of ethnic conflict

Singapore's 2020 general election was held amidst the country's most serious public health and economic crises in the country's history. Despite expectations that these parallel crises would precipitate a flight to safety and result in a strong performance by the dominant People's Action Party (PAP), the ruling party received its third lowest popular vote share (61.2%) and lowest ever seat share (89.2%) since independence. This article engages explanations for the unexpected results and argues that the vote swing against the PAP was enabled by a hitherto largely overlooked factor: the 2020 election included two opposition parties that could credibly compete with the PAP on the valence considerations that drive voting behaviour in Singapore, giving voters a perceived safe alternative to the PAP at the constituency level. Quantitative tests support the notion that party credibility—rather than demographic factors, incumbency advantages, Group Representation Constituencies, or assessments of the PAP's fourth generation leaders—best explain variation in the vote swing against the PAP. Ultimately, the results suggest that the PAP's monopoly on party credibility is no longer assured, thus portending greater opposition competitiveness and pressure against the PAP in future elections. Nonetheless, the PAP's dominance remains intact and there is little evidence of a general appetite among the electorate for a non-PAP government, suggesting the likelihood of smaller course corrections rather than major steps towards democratization in the coming years (Pac Aff/GIGA)

AbstractList experiments are a widely used survey technique for estimating the prevalence of socially sensitive attitudes or behaviors. Their design, however, makes them vulnerable to bias: because treatment group respondents see a greater number of items (J + 1) than control group respondents (J), the treatment group mean may be mechanically inflated due simply to the greater number of items. The few previous studies that directly examine this do not arrive at definitive conclusions. We find clear evidence of inflation in an original dataset, though only among respondents with low educational attainment. Furthermore, we use available data from previous studies and find similar heterogeneous patterns. The evidence of heterogeneous effects has implications for the interpretation of previous research using list experiments, especially in developing world contexts. We recommend a simple solution: using a necessarily false placebo statement for the control group equalizes list lengths, thereby protecting against mechanical inflation without imposing costs or altering interpretations.