Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • Malaysia’s GE13, Long Form Research Blogging Redux, and Statistics versus Econometrics

    A little over two years ago, I wrote a post on “Long Form Research Blogging” related to my series of posts on Malaysia’s Thirteenth General Election. I wondered at the time if there would ever be a way to published all of that in an academic journal.

    Through an unusual set of coincidences, I have managed to cannibalize a good deal of those posts in an article that is now in print. What’s unusual about the process? Just that the article is a commentary on another article which appears in the Journal of East Asian Studies which makes what I think are some erroneous conclusions about the relationship between ethnicity and votes for the Barisan Nasional coalition. The full-text is not yet available from the publisher’s website. But I have made a copy of the original article, my comment, and the authors’ rejoinder available here: PDF. This is of course only for your own personal use, dear reader.

    I think that the contributions speak for themselves. But I do want to flag one issue in NRVP’s rejoinder which I find puzzling. They draw on a distinction between statistics and econometrics as describe by Rob Hyndman, and describe me as taking a statistical approach.

    The argument above that Pepinsky makes against our use of the fractional logit model is an example of the difference in disposition between taking either a theory-driven or data-driven approach. While largely similar, econometrics is predominantly theory driven while statistics tend to be data driven. Therefore, an econometrician develops a model based on economic (and other relevant) theories while a statistician may build a model after looking at datasets. The econometrician subsequently confronts the model with datasets to test the theory. The interested reader can refer to Rob Hyndman’s blog post1 for interesting insights into the differences between the two. In this context, it can be said that our econometric model is theory driven while Pepinsky’s model is data driven.

    This is odd to me because I thought that I was taking the econometric approach, and they were taking the statistical approach! I mean, contrast that quote above with the following argument from NRVP about why they have opted to use ethnic population totals, which I argue are theoretically inappropriate as a substitute for ethnic population shares:

    • It would make the article too technical, distracting the reader from
      the political issues at hand.
    • Interpretation of isometric log-ratio transformed variables is difficult,
      even in linear regression models, thereby making it hard to
      make useful inferences.
    • No work has been done on how the isometric log-ratio transformation
      can be performed on quadratic variables and for interaction variables

    In lieu of the above, we decided to go with ethnic population totals as our measure of ethnicity, as the sum constraint would at least somewhat be removed. However, we acknowledge that this is not the best way to model ethnicity, which Pepinsky has correctly and strongly pointed out. Nevertheless, in our opinion, it is the better choice to model the data.

    That looks to me like NRVP are prioritizing statistical procedure over coherent theory. My view is that we should not do that.

    Readers who have slogged the whole way through this post might also be interested in Andrew Gelman’s thoughts on statistics versus econometrics.

  • Religious Regulation in Indonesia and Malaysia

    Several weeks ago the Monkey Cage published an essay by Daniel Philpott on religious freedom in Muslim majority countries. The essay makes two important points: (1) that many Muslim majority countries are open to multiple faiths, and (2) that religious unfreedom in Muslim countries need not be Islamist in origin, it can be secular in origin. Along the way, however, Philpott’s essay makes the following point about “patterns of repression” of religious freedom in the Muslim world.

    The Islamist pattern represents those Muslim-majority states that deny religious freedom by using the state’s laws, policies and coercive power to promote and enforce a highly restrictive and traditional form of sharia, or Islamic law, in all areas of life – economy, culture, religious practice, education, family life, dress and many others. Such states include Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Cooperation Council members, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and the Sudan, but also (beyond the Middle East) Malaysia, Indonesia and Nigeria. Iran and Saudi Arabia arguably deserve the status of standard-bearers due to how widely they are emulated and how actively they seek to spread their version of Islam.

    Including Indonesia and Malaysia alongside Iran and Saudi Arabia is striking. I’ve shared this with scholars of Islam and politics, both those with backgrounds in Southeast Asia and those without such backgrounds, and the reaction—uniformly—is that this is incorrect. I share this evaluation. Under no definition of the term “Islamist” does it make sense to code Malaysia and Indonesia as Islamist, or to conclude that these are states use “laws, policies and coercive power to promote and enforce a highly restrictive and traditional form of sharia…in all areas of life.”

    I asked Philpott via email about his decision to code Indonesia and Malaysia this way, and he generously shared his thoughts. He relies on a 2009 report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life to code Indonesia and Malaysia as having high official restrictions on religion. While that report unfortunately gives us no real explanation of these coding choices, I don’t disagree with that whatsoever. My disagreement lies in how we understand the source of that unfreedom.

    Here is the key conceptual point. Philpott’s coding scheme considers the oppose of secular to be Islamist. Since neither Indonesia nor Malaysia is a secular state—the constitution of each invokes religion explicitly—the only alternative must be Islamist. I consider there to be many alternatives to secular repression of religion. One variety is Islamist. Another is nationalist. Still another is what we might call “official religionist.” However we term it, Islamist won’t do for Indonesia and Malaysia.

    Indonesia is an easy case to make. There was a point when Indonesians debated explicitly invoking sharia law in the Indonesian constitution under the so-called Jakarta charter. But that proposal failed (see Elson 2009 for a recent discussion of the Jakarta Charter and its implications). Since then, the Indonesian constitution has recognized an all-powerful “God”—deliberately translated as Tuhan rather than Allah—under the state ideology of Pancasila. This formulation explicitly and repeatedly rejects the supremacy of Islam over other religions (see this official 1978 explication).

    How, then, is religion regulated in Indonesia? Through restrictions on what counts as faith. Under the New Order, there were five recognized faiths: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Since democratization Confucianism has joined this. There is no space for, say, Judaism. There is also heavy regulation of “non-standard” forms of Islam. This means that so-called deviationist Islamic groups such as the Ahmadiyah run afoul of the official conceptualization of Islam (and interestingly, if Ahmadis where not to insist that they are Muslims, they might not face many restrictions at all). But there is also comparable regulation of non-Muslim faiths. Indeed, you can go to the Ministry of Religion in Indonesia and learn about the Directorate-General of Catholic affairs, Buddhist affairs, and so forth. Under Indonesian law, these bodies are responsible for all manner of norms, standards, and procedures for the organization and functioning of other officially recognized faiths. Critically, these are not Muslims regulating Christians, for Islamist ends; these are Christians regulating Christians, for nationalist ends.

    The case of Malaysia is more complicated, yet more interesting. Malaysia is an Islamic state, as I argued here. But it is not an Islamist state. The key distinction is the complete irrelevance of Islamic law for non-Muslims, and the parallel operation of civil and sharia courts for Muslims. Make no mistake: Islam does have constitutional status in Malaysia. But Islam is neither the sole source of legal authority in Malaysia, nor the final arbiter of debates about the propriety of various forms of social or religious regulation. It is the constitution (specifically, Article 3) that establishes Islam at the state religion of Malaysia; the very next article establishes that the Federal Constitution is the “supreme law” of Malaysia. This is entirely different from a Saudi-type model in which Islam is the ultimate source of legal and constitutional authority.

    Once one understand these points, then we can understand why Philpott’s coding of Indonesia and Malaysia causes such surprise. And what’s more, the fact that the Indonesian and Malaysian states neither promote nor enforce any type of conservative interpretation of sharia in all aspects of daily life—even among Muslims in the Islamic state of Malaysia—is no longer puzzling or surprising, it is natural.

    To be very clear, there are many strict Islamists in both countries who wish to enforce a conservative interpretation of Islam in all aspects of daily life. And it is true that Islam is regulated officially in both countries, by Muslims with a normative conception of what Islam means. Yet it is also true that even in Malaysia, there is nothing approaching the level of all-encompassing regulation that one finds in Saudi Arabia or Iran. This is a difference of kind, not one of degree. The single most important observation to make here is that even in the Islamic state of Malaysia, it is an opposition party that is pushing to implement hudud, and even then only in one state in the northeast. And so far this has failed, because it contradicts the Federal Constitution!

    It is important to understand the various sources of religious unfreedom in Muslim-majority states, and Philpott’s essay is a critical first step in that direction. Yet we must not ignore how the regulation of religious practice and belief varies. The Indonesian and Malaysian cases are key counterexamples to the assumption that religious regulation is the same as Islamist regulation. These cases must be central to any analysis of the phenomenon of religious freedom across the Muslim world.