Nomination Day was April 20: we now know the full list of candidates for all 222 parliamentary races and 505 state assembly races. Election Day is less than two weeks away now. Some very interesting analysis of the Nomination Day…
A new ruling by Malaysia’s Registrar of Societies on the Democratic Action Party‘s Central Executive Committee illustrates how electoral authoritarian regimes use the law as a tool of regime maintenance. Malaysia’s political regime is commonly understood by political scientists as…
In most states Malaysians will cast votes in two elections: for the Dewan Rakyat and for the Dewan Undangan Negeri. The former is the lower house of the federal parliament, and the latter is the state parliament. Sarawak is an…
Benedict Anderson has written a powerful essay that appears in the current edition of Asia-Pacific Journal entitled “Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy.” (I learned of it from Jeff Hadler, who just co-organized…
Now that Prime Minister Najib Razak has dissolved Parliament, Malaysia’s elections are coming soon. Right now the two coalitions are in the process of nominating candidates for each electoral district. This process probably has no exact parallel anywhere else in…
In two previous posts on the upcoming elections in Malaysia, I’ve shown data from the previous elections in 2008. In both cases, I restricted my analysis to Peninsular Malaysia. Why? To answer this, take a look at the map. About…
There is an excellent discussion of Transparency in the Social Sciences at the Center for Effective Global Action. Anyone working with data in the social sciences should read and learn. I want to comment on one small bit that caught…
In my first Malaysian 13th General Elections Preview, I broke down vote returns by party in the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition. Another revealing exercise is to break down by district which kinds of parties contested the election, to see which…
The folks at New Mandala are putting together a series of posts on GE13, getting various academics and practitioners to share their views on the two coalitions (Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat). You can read my thoughts here. See also…
There is a fascinating post on Language Log on bahasa, the word used to refer to languages in Indonesian, Malay, and various other Southeast Asian languages (many of them which are not Austronesian languages). I am proud to recall that…
