{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020694752402069475, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0029563932002956393, 'mean_word_length': 5.943589743589744, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Parliament as Prime Minister’s electoral college: the defection game in Malaysia’s democratic backsliding

ABSTRACT The collapse of Malaysia’s multiethnic reformist government by a party coup in February 2020 – called the ‘Sheraton Move’ – can be assessed along at least three dimensions: first, a personality-clash power struggle between key Malay leaders and their parties; second, the deep ethnic divide which drives the rejection of a multiethnic government in favour of return to a more pro-Malay equilibrium; and third, dysfunctional legislative-executive relations and dysfunctional political parties, which reduce Parliament to the Prime Minister’s electoral college, deny constructive roles in policy competition and law-making to opposition parliamentarians and government backbenchers, and thus centralise power within parties which makes cyclical infighting and splintering inevitable, and which also collectively makes the party system vulnerable to defections and chaotic realignments. This article focuses on the parliament-party dimension and examines how Malaysia’s deviations from the Westminster model have contributed to the political impasse, how the payroll vote is cynically used to sustain a fragile government and how keeping the system unchanged may lead to greater instability and cause multiparty democracy to be discredited.