Spurious Majority: The ‘Wrong Winner’ Result In The Thirteenth General Election Of Malaysia
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Date
2018-03
Authors
Choo, Chean Hau
Journal Title
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Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
In the Thirteenth General Election of Malaysia in 2013, the ruling alliance won the general election via their victory in a majority of seats, but unprecedentedly they lost the popular vote to the opposition alliance. Such a result is known as ‘spurious majority’, ‘wrong winner’ result, or ‘perverse’ result which occurs when the winning party, coalition, or alliance wins the election even though coming second in terms of their national vote share. This study aims to, first, determine the causal factors of, and examine the ways these causal factors engender, spurious majority in Malaysia; and second, find out the relative impacts between systemic factors and proximate factors, and between institutional factors and reactive factors, on such a result. To achieve these, this study uses the parallel mixed methods research that utilises both quantitative and qualitative methods in data collection and data analysis. The former method is based on numerical data derived from electoral outcomes, while the latter method is based on narrative data derived from interview accounts with members of parliament. The integrated findings of both methods show that, first, the ruling alliance’s victory in a majority of seats is primarily due to their strong lead given by malapportionment and gerrymandering and marginally due to competitive authoritarianism and the electoral system of single-member-district-plurality; second, their lower vote share is attributed to two-alliance system and polarisation of voter preferences to a great extent and high turnout to a lesser extent; thirdly, the effects of third-party votes are negligible; finally, all four groups of causal factors play a vital role in engendering spurious majority in Malaysia, even though in very different ways.
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Keywords
Spurious majority the wrong winner result , in the thirteenth general election of Malaysia