8 March: Eclipsing May 13

3. The Ethnic Voting Pattern for Kuala Lumpur and Selangor in 2008

80 Lee Hock Guan 3 The Ethnic Voting Pattern for Kuala Lumpur and Selangor in 2008 Lee Hock Guan Five months before the March 2008 General Election, Bersih,1 frustrated by the BN government’s refusal to act on their demands, organized a demonstration to protest against gerrymandering, voter fraud practices, rampant irregularities in elections, and the misuse of public funds and facilities by BN for electoral campaigning. Without a doubt, successive BN governments have modified and manipulated the ‘firstpast -the-post’ electoral system to benefit the incumbent ruling coalition. With the inequitable electoral system buttressed by BN-UMNO hegemonic domination of ethnic discourse and politics, it was generally assumed the Opposition would have little chance of denying BN its twothirds parliamentary majority and stop it from winning all the state governments, except for the Malay heartland states of Kelantan and Trengganu.2 Most observers reckoned it a foregone conclusion that the Abdullah-led BN would win its two-thirds parliamentary majority. The Ethnic Voting Pattern for Kuala Lumpur and Selangor 81 The dramatic electoral setbacks suffered by BN in the elections thus took almost everyone by surprise, including BN and the opposition parties. BN did win but lost its twothirds majority in parliament and the Kelantan, Kedah, Penang, Perak and Selangor state governments to the Opposition (Khoo 2008). Various explanations have been given to account for the unexpected March 2008 election results. Ong (2008) singled out Abdullah’s ineffectual leadership and his administration’s failure to deliver on the campaign promises he had made in the 2004 election as the most important contributing factor. Welsh (2008) offered ten factors; including “reformasi spirit lives on”, “BN coalition failings and infighting”, effective use of new media by the opposition, better opposition cooperation and strategy, and backfire from the personal attack on Anwar Ibrahim, the de facto leader of the opposition. Undeniably, several factors contributed to the uncharacteristic change in the ethnic voting pattern and ethnic vote swing in the election. Furthermore, it was the varying degrees in the Malay, Chinese and Indian vote swing in the direction of the Opposition that resulted in the BN’s electoral setbacks. Some observers however cited the sizable ethnic vote swing for the Opposition as proof that there had been an important shift towards cross-ethnic allegiance voting in the 2008 election, unlike in past elections where voter behavior was usually dictated by a greater preference for the party representing one’s ethnic group. This is a highly problematic claim since vote swing simply measures the “average of the change in share of the vote won by two parties contesting an election” and “is not, nor is it intended to be a portrayal of the actual behavior of voters” (Rose 82 Lee Hock Guan 1991, p. 29). As such, although there were more crossethnic votes for the Opposition in the 2008 election, it would be premature to conclude that Malaysians had moved beyond voting according to ethnic allegiance.3 This paper will provide an analysis of the ethnic voting preference and ethnic vote swing with special focus on the extent of cross-ethnic voting for the opposition parties — PKR, DAP and PAS — in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.4 Ethnic Voting Preference and Cross-Ethnic Voting In Malaysia, it is usually understood that the vast majority of voters are inclined to support the party representing his or her ethnic group. This was because in the development of the Malaysian state, leaders who exploited ethnic sentiments and interests to mobilize ethnic voters had gained the upper hand. An ethnic voting pattern where people would vote according to ethnic allegiances and interests and not on the basis of the policies or credentials of the competing political parties and their leaders, prevailed and became entrenched. The end result was a ‘racial arithmetic’ where political parties derived their support from one or the other of the ethnic groups, where “selection of candidates for constituencies is also based on this consideration” and where “the major issues and problems are all viewed through racially tinted glasses” (Ong 1980, p. 169). The ‘racial arithmetically’ defined electoral system would privilege the ruling coalition party, which is “an alliance of ethnic parties, each of which can still profess to be working for the interests of its own ethnic group even while The Ethnic Voting Pattern for Kuala Lumpur and Selangor 83 participating in the alliance” (Horowitz 1985, p. 396). After 1969, the new...