Malaysia: Middle-Class Affectations of a Democratizing Multicultural Society

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Category: General Election
Published: Saturday, 12 July 2008 10:57
Posted by Johan Saravanamuttu

The underlying theme of the paper is that Malaysian society, albeit with its embedded ‘multiculturalism’, has reached a new stage. It is now clearly a beneficiary of capitalist development with the concomitant rise of a new and large middle class exhibiting various middle-class affectations cutting across ethnicity. This has led to the growth of a political culture of “developmentalism??? understood as the social corollary of the developmental state. Developmentalism leads to the many affectations for middle-class consumerist lifestyle – even amongst the working class – but at the same time it creates a political culture that is wont to eschew political risk and political agency.  Publication: 4th International Malaysian Studies Conference; 3-5 August 2004, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi.  Author: Johan Saravanamuttu.

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The internet’s political impact and the penetration/participation paradox in Malaysia and Singapore

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Category: General Election
Published: Saturday, 07 June 2008 22:39
Posted by George, Cherian

It verges on tautology to say that internet use depends on internet availability. Obviously, the former will not occur in the absence of the latter. However, it is quite another thing to claim that there is a simple linear relationship between availability and use. It is conceivable that, once the diffusion of a communication technology has reached a certain critical threshold, every additional unit of that technology does not generate improved use, either quantitatively or qualitatively. The use to which any given level of technology is put may depend on other, non-technological factors. Accordingly, a country with lower penetration levels of a medium may, paradoxically, exhibit superior utilization of that medium than a country with higher penetration. This proposition is illustrated by comparing two neighbouring countries in Asia that implemented early and aggressive programmes to roll out public access to the internet, Malaysia and Singapore. These two states introduced the internet to their populations at about the same time, and within broadly similar regulatory regimes. Malaysia, being the larger and less wealthy of the two countries, has predictably achieved significantly lower levels of internet penetration than Singapore. Source: Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 27(6): 903–920.  Author: George, Cherian. 

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The 12th Malaysian General Elections: Seeking a Fresh Mandate

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Category: General Election
Published: Wednesday, 04 June 2008 23:36
Posted by Saravanamuttu, Johan

It is puzzling for some why Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who won a landslide general election in 2004, is calling a snap election on March 8 this year, a whole year ahead of the mandatory five years. Much of the reasoning revolves around two factors; the economy and Anwar Ibrahim.  Publication: Opinion Asia, 15 Feb 2008.  Author: Saravanamuttu, Johan. 

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A wave of change across South-East Asia? But counter-currents too

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Category: General Election
Published: Wednesday, 04 June 2008 23:56
Posted by Farish Noor

The latest results from the governorial elections in the provinces of West Java and North Sumatra, Indonesia, would suggest that a sea-change of sorts is taking place in Indonesia. Shortly after the shock election results following the general election in Malaysia earlier this year, the governorial elections of Indonesia has led to the victory of the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) and the National Mandate Party (Pan), both of which are Islamist in character and both of which trace their ideological and intellectual genealogy back to the Islamist Masjumi party of the 1950s that struggled to make Indonesia an Islamic state until it was finally banned by President Sukarno in 1960. Farish Noor analyses the implications. Publication: Aliran, 10 April 2008.  Author: Farish Noor. 

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Prickly Ambivalence: State, Society and Semidemocracy in Malaysia

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Category: General Election
Published: Wednesday, 04 June 2008 22:46
Posted by Weiss, Meredith

British colonial policies set the stage for the subsequent balance between state and civil society in Malaysia, including the persistent racial stratification of the public sphere, cross-racial differences in modes of state–society engagement and the focus on development of citizenship skills for some groups and autonomous self-regulation for others. This article explores the vestiges and implications of this legacy in Malaysia to assess, first, how determining an effect the colonial experience had on later political developments; and, second, how consideration of the sort of civil society and state–society relations that emerged out of this historical context adds nuance to our understanding of semi-democracy.  Source: Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 43:1, 61 - 81, March 2005.  Author: Weiss, Meredith. 

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