The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia by Meredith L. Weiss (review)

Meredith Weiss's Roots of Resilience is essential reading for those grappling with two persistent questions about politics in Malaysia and Singapore. First, why have those in power stayed in power for so long. Second, what are the sources of change in these political systems. Both questions are timely given the ongoing transformations taking place. Malaysia has experienced three different governments in three years (2018–20), all led by different parties, and Singapore has lost ground electorally in the 2020 general election and its current leadership transition is arguably the most uncertain in history.

Arguing that attention needs to move away from looking at politics as elections, Weiss's book provides her answer to these questions. She argues that the answers lie within the parties themselves, their history, the nexus with the state apparatus, including local government/party organs, and effective use of clientelism/patronage. These arguments are sound and robustly discussed as she contextualizes how both these hybrid political systems led by UMNO/BN and the PAP in Malaysia and Singapore respectively have strengthened and maintained their hold on power. Her use of archival material and interviews are both rich and carefully done, with the historical discussions the strongest in her book. The book is yet another example of Weiss's fine scholarship on Malaysian politics.

Weiss's analysis both compliments and contrasts with other broad interpretations of politics that adopt a focus on party institutions. Dan Slater's Ordering Power (2010) argued that power came from the state formation process and state revenues. Edmund Terence Gomez (2018) highlighted the centralization of power and institutionalized involvement in business in his Minister of Finance Incorporated. These works share a focus on how the fusing of party and the state explain the longevity of the parties in power. Weiss's special contribution in this collection is to highlight the role of party organizations and patronage practices. Beyond her macro accounting of drivers of national politics, her analysis enriches studies of the dominant political parties in both countries, a scholarship that largely focuses on party leaders and legacies.

While bringing greater depth to the analysis of the politics of Singapore and Malaysia, Weiss's analysis is still top-down. The engagement with voters, the operations of the party organizations (with their diversity) and the grassroots themselves are missing. They are acted upon rather than in a dynamic exchange. There are no meaningful voices explaining how voters or society has responded to the fusion of party, state, and patronage. As such, the discussion does not fully capture how the parties are rooted—both the expansion and contraction of the rootedness of the parties in Malaysian and Singaporean society require further elaboration. This speaks to a weakness in her analysis, its inability to effectively explain current changes taking place, as the power of both dominant parties has eroded and, in the case of Malaysia's UMNO, been displaced from power. While there is acknowledgment that the practices of patronage persist and the systems remain resilient for this reason, the top-down analytical lens leaves the reader wanting more, especially in light of the greater political instability and current tests of the resilience of the political systems. This perhaps is the subject of a subsequent study.

The book appears to have been written for political scientists. The terminology and jargon speak to ongoing debates within the field and can be difficult to follow for the unfamiliar. The details in the careful accounting of political history and the bold argument presented, however, make the book a valuable read and a much-needed contribution to deepen analysis of how politics in both countries are changing, now with weaker dominant parties decaying at their roots.