Race, Class and Politics in Peninsular Malaysia

The General Election of 2008

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12350314
AutoresLian Kwen Fee (0000-0002-7755-0903, National University of Singapore, autor de correspondencia), Jayanath Appudurai (National University of Singapore)
Año2011
Volumen35
Número1
Páginas63-82
Fecha de publicación2011-02-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAsian Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1035-7823 • E-ISSN: 1467-8403
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10357823.2011.552706
OpenAlexW2078332857
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas27

Racial politics have bedevilled peninsular Malaysia since independence in 1957, largely sustained by a ruling coalition of partners sharing power unequally, in a consociational government. The effect of a racialised practice over fifty years is the institutionalisation of the politics of ethnic pluralism, each component driven by its own internal dynamic and cultural logic: for the Chinese it is the politics of economic security, for the Tamils the politics of religion and caste, and for the Malays incipient class antagonisms that are historically rooted in a feudal society. In the general election of 2008, there was an unprecedented swing of votes across the ethnic divide against the ruling government, resulting in the loss of five state governments to an opposition coalition espousing multiculturalism and the loss of the government's two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. However, we argue that these developments do not signal the beginning of the end of racial politics in peninsular Malaysia. Instead, the opposition has skilfully recoded multiculturalism as social justice and accountability in racial terms, and effectively communicated this to an essentially racialised electorate at a time when Malays, Chinese and Tamils had lost faith in the ruling government's ability to address deep-seated grievances specific to each of these communities

Caste · Democracy · Multiculturalism · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian Studies and History · Law · Socioeconomic Development in Asia