Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Malaysia’s GE14 in Four Graphs

    Right now, Malaysians are voting in the country’s 14th general elections. For the best coverage by knowledgeable academic political scientists and others, visit New Mandala‘s Malaysia GE14 section.

    In my view, the story of this election is the three-cornered race: with the former opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat dead and gone, the incumbent Barisan National coalition faces challenges on two sides. On one, the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). On the other, the new Pakatan Harapan coalition that replaces PAS with the Malaysian United Indigenous Party or BERSATU.

    Under the PR coalition, all three major opposition parties agreed not to contest one another, meaning that nearly every election was a two-party affair (fitting with Duverger’s Law) in Malaysia’s plurality-rule electoral system. But PAS no longer participates in that coalition, so there is no agreement for one major opposition party not to contest the others. The result is a three-cornered fight in most districts.

    In my view, the implications can be captured in four simple graphs. I made these using data from undi.info, scraped by Josh Meyer-Gutbrod for future work with Seb Dettman. Let’s compare the types of seats that PAS contested in 2013 (GE13) versus those that it is contesting today, based on the percentage of the district’s population that is Malay. (NOTE: all of the analysis that follows is for peninsular Malaysia only.) Here is what we find.

    In 2013, PAS contested primarily in Malay-majority districts. This is still true, but it has taken the fight to mixed Malay/non-Malay districts as well in ways that it never had before. Compare this with seats contested by DAP, a PH party with a largely Chinese constituency.

    The DAP is contesting a bit more in Chinese-majority seats than it used to. This is more striking relative to PKR, a multi-ethnic PH founded by Anwar Ibrahim.

    PKR is contesting in slightly districts that are slightly less ethnic Chinese than it used to. Finally, how has this affected the BN? Well, look at UMNO.

    UMNO is contesting more in districts with a strong Malay majority.

    Now, there are two things going on here. One is the redelineation of Malaysia’s electoral districts, which has produced more “ethnic strongholds.” But also, PAS is taking the fight across most of Malaysia and this upsets the strategic calculations of the BN and PH coalitions.

    The story of GE14 will be what happens in these three-cornered races. Will PAS divide the opposition Malay vote and allow the BN to pull off an improbable win? Or will UMNO find itself outmatched by PAS in multi-ethnic districts that PAS had tended to concede to PKR? Something else entirely? It’s a waiting game right now; we won’t know. But in 24 hours we will know some of the answers.

  • Glam, Metal, and Regime Change

    I recently had the opportunity to guest lecture in my colleague Mona Krewel‘s course Politics and Music. The title of my lecture: Wind of Change: Glam/Metal, Protest, and Regime Change from Berlin to Tahrir Square. You can see the slides here (PDF).

    Although it is certainly fun to play “Heroes” and “Youth Gone Wild” to a room full of nineteen year olds,* I found it much more challenging to prepare this lecture than I had expected. It’s easy to read lyrics and see how they are political, and it’s easy to show videos of bands performing during important political moments, but teaching good social science about how music affects something like regime change is hard.

    The approach I followed is this. Start with what we know about regime change: what causes it? Under what conditions do regimes collapse? That gives us a series of analytical approaches and causal pathways that have regime change at the end. From there we can ask, where does music—of any sort—fit into those causal pathways?

    My preliminary thoughts are that we can think about glam and metal as having three roles in creating and sustaining oppositions to authoritarian rule. Glam or metal can function as a regime defier, a type revealer, and a coordination device.

    1. Regime defier: the music itself—both lyrics and performance—undermines ideological hegemony or social conformity
    2. Type revealer: listening to glam or metal is a signal of what you believe or value, and allows others to infer whether you share common characteristics
    3. Coordination device: performances serve as focal points, and the creation and distribution of illicit music creates interpersonal trust and develops movement expertise

    Now we have at least some analytical purchase over how glam and metal might matter for regime change. But it always pays to be skeptical, so I concluded the lecture by inviting the students to question everything that I’d told them. Specifically, I invited them to ask

    1. Is glam/metal special or unique? My guess is no: rap, punk, hip hop, and other forms of music could probably do the same thing.
    2. Is glam/metal incidental? There’s a good case that it is. Think of it this way: did the cassette player cause the Iranian revolution?
    3. When does glam/metal help and when doesn’t it? There is much more metal out there than there is regime change.
    4. Is glam/metal fundamentally democratic? Aside from the obvious point that, say, Nazi black metal is pro-Nazi, I think that there is a good argument that metal’s characteristic focus on power could easily be used for illiberal or anti-democratic purposes.
      The case for glam is different. I’m willing to bet that glam’s characteristic focus on gender non-conformity makes it fundamentally liberal as a musical genre.**

    NOTES

    * It is also interesting to think about how both metal and glam emerged from the same late 1960s U.K. psychedelic rock scene.

    ** David Bowie’s Nazi period may be evidence against this proposition.