New Media, Incumbency and Malaysian Politics: The Defeat of the Barisan Nasional (BN) in GE14 (2018)

The Malaysian 14 th General Election (GE14) has ended the political domination of Barisan Nasional (BN) of the last 61 years and resulted in a new discussion in Malaysian politics. The main purpose of this study is to explore the factors that caused BN to fail in the last election and to refine the incumbency theory posited by Hirano and Snyder Jr (2012) and Torcal (2014). We argue that various factors have contributed to the defeat of the BN government in the 14 th GE, namely the 1MDB corruption scandal, the implementation of the progressive Good and Service Tax (GST), the rise of living costs, and the China-oriented foreign and economic policies, as well as the Mahathir factor. Our results also contribute to further developing incumbency theory. Instead of relying on traditional factor of incumbent defeat in election such as scandal and economic factors, the role of new media in spreading the news about the corruption scandal and the government’s economic underperformance have also contributed to a political shift in Malaysia


INTRODUCTION
Researching Malaysian politics is complex and needs various perspectives, especially when analysing how British colonisation has influenced the dynamics of ethnic relations and the day-to-day dynamics of the political elite and its transactional activities.In this paper, we argue that several factors need to be considered regarding why the incumbent government of BN could be defeated by the contender in the 14th GE.The case of the BN's defeat has provided a narrative that prolonged domination of a group of elites could fail owing to lack of leadership and implementing popular policy for its people.
The Malaysian politics provides evidence that the defeat of the incumbent BN government occurred for various reasons, which have been identified by scholars on incumbency theory, such as Hirano and Snyder Jr (2012), as a personal scandal, or the government's economic underperformance (Torcal, 2014).
However, these two factors need the help of 'non-government' new media to generate continuous public awareness of the need for regime change, especially when the governmentcontrolled media plays a dominant role in driving public opinion in Malaysia.
Furthermore, we take two theoretical standpoints relating to personal scandal (Hirano and Snyder Jr (2012) and economic factors Torcal

METHODS
In a classic and important study of Malaysian politics, Lijphart (1969) argued that a political consensus among the ethnic groups has been implemented since independence to ensure the stability of the political system.The ethnic segregation policy was implemented in the British colonial era, and the British colonial regime created the dynamics of inter-ethnic contestation in Malaysian politics (Kheng, 2005;Yaakop, 2010).Through the colonisation process, the presence of three different ethnic groups has transformed Malaysia into a multiracial country and politically dynamic.
Methodologically, we applied the qualitative approach in this study.
Our data has relied on in-depth interviews with the participants.(Trounstine, 2011(Trounstine, , 2013)).However, those with scandals and weak performance during their first period of administration can then suffer difficulty being re-elected in the second term.

MALAYSIAN POLITICS
The Alliance Party (Parti

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2014), both of which contribute to a weaker position for the incumbent in an upcoming election.Based on our findings, we have argued that these two standpoints are correct in some aspects.But, they need refining by adding a discussion of the role of new media in influencing Malaysian public opinion on the need to examine the performance of the BN government in the election.Our argument claims that none of the literature on these particular topics provides a more in-depth discussion on reciprocal relations among personal scandal, economic factors, new media, and the cause of the incumbent government's defeat.Instead of scandal and underperformance of the country's economy, we argued that it is important to involve the role of new media when discussing Malaysian politics nowadays.Why is this study important?there is a lot of discussion about the Malaysian Politics when it comes to discussing the defeat of BN in the 2018 GE.But, none of the publications has specifically addressed the collapse of BN from the perspective of incumbency theory and new media.Therefore, our research focuses on the discussion that assists us to refine the general tendency about incumbency theory by taking the case of BN defeat as the example.This paper is organised into several sections.The first section is an introduction and followed by a literature review on incumbency and politics.The method is in the third section, while the fourth explains Malaysia Politics's dynamics from a historical perspective, followed by a discussion about how the opposition parties could defeat the ruling government, explaining the conditions and factors that led to political change in Malaysia post-2018 election.The sixth section discusses Malaysia's political uncertainty and future of Malaysian Politics.The last section is a concluding remark.
always demanding.Many scholars explain that the incumbency factor is the important aspect for being re-elected in the second term of administration.The incumbent who performs well during the first term of their administration has a greater chance of being re-elected Many studies have attempted to explore the relations between the incumbent's performance and the election, in relation to the incumbent's performance during the first period of administration either by the elite or political party.In this sense, we cannot separate the incumbency status between the person and political party; there is a connection between the members and the performance of the political party.In advanced democratic countries, the party performance relates to the performance shown by its members.In the patronage democracy model, the relations between the party's elite and its voters are a key issue(Chandra, 2007).Moreover, Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita (2008, p.1006), have argued that there are two reasons behind the success of an incumbent: firstly, that "high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection); and secondly, that "high-quality incumbents deter challengers (strategic challenger entry)".In this argument, we found that two of the keys to success as the incumbent, ability and quality, are represented in the candidate's personal leadership.In the context of the Indonesian local election, the incumbent has obtained more advantage to be reelected in the second term of their administration.For example, in the case of Tri Rismaharini in the city of Surabaya's mayoral election, and Herman HN in the city of Bandar Lampung, the incumbent mayors secured more than 80 percent of the popular vote in the 2015 local election owing to the impact of success of the incumbent in being re-elected is due to various factors, the major one being the economy, based on this literature review.Lack of leadership to provide a better economy for the people becomes the factor most likely to lead to the incumbent government being defeated by their contender in the election.The literature also reveals that economic factors, including the rising cost of living, are those most likely to lead to the downfall of the ruling government in the second period of election in some countries, as shown by the cases of Malaysia, Spain and the US.However, few studies endeavour to argue that the role of new media in triggering a political shift is essential, especially when it comes to distributing the news on personal scandals of the elite and the underperformance of the government to Malaysian voters.This paper therefore argues that the nexus of relations among the lack of economic performance, scandal, and the role of new media were the most significant factors in the defeat of the BN government in the 14 th GE.
(2020)    Prior to the 14th GE in 2018, Mahathir revoked his political support of Najib Razak by establishing a new party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Malaysian United Indigenous Party).He not only established a new party but apparently also joined the opposition party coalition.Moreover, it is a unique political narrative when 'the enemy' becomes a friend in politics.Mahathir imprisoned Anwar Ibrahim in the late 1990s without proper due process of law.In a speech after the result of the 14th GE was announced, Mahathir told the media that the new government was not willing to avenge Najib Razak's government.His government wanted to ensure that the rule of law had been returned to the 'right path' in the Malaysian political landscape.Mahathir then appointed some of the senior politicians such as Wan Azizah, the leader of the People's Justice Party (PKR), who also became the first Malay woman appointed as Vice Prime Minister (PM).Mahathir also appointed Lim Guan Eng from DAP as the Finance Minister and Tommy Thomas as Attorney-General (AG).Mahathir also appointed some of his closest friends as government advisors, such as former central bank governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz and former finance minister Daim Zainuddin.In this sense, we can presume that Mahathir is going to strengthen and focus on economic development by reducing the number of poor people, developing rural areas, and reducing the country's debt to 1 trillion Ringgit.However, the PH government has recently suffered a big challenge after several months in power.The main reason for this was the transition of power from Mahathir to Anwar Ibrahim, which prompted Mahathir to resign as the 7th Prime Minister, and unexpectedly Muhyiddin Yassin took over as the 8 th Prime Minister.Further, the dynamics of Malaysian politics have continued and are still in an issues relating to the economy appear to have contributed to the decreasing popularity and the weakening position of the BN coalition.These are Najib Razak's 1MDB corruption scandal, the weakening of the country's economy including the rising cost of living cost, and the increasing price of the Good and Service Tax (GST), as well as closer diplomatic relations between Malaysia and China.In this sense,Welsh (2019, p. 85) has argued that "…Malaysia's sociopolitical conditions before the electionpolitical polarisation, a rise of anger, increasing economic vulnerabilities, as well as increased nationalist and populist sentiments".Moreover, Long (2019, p.1) has also claimed that the category of scandals, which involves regime's corruption scandal was a major factor in voters splitting their ticket to vote for the PH in the 14 th GE. ) will decrease from its peak performance in 2017.The World Bank is projecting that the annual GDP will only rise to 4.729 percent in 2020.Regarding the weak performance of the economy, the PH was also able to capitalise on the country's deteriorating economic performance by turning it into an effective political manifesto and negatively affecting the popularity of the BN during the campaign process.In addition, with charismatic leaders such as Mahathir and Anwar Ibrahim, these manifestos were so effective, with the help of social media(Welsh, 2019), in reducing the popularity of the BN.The PH manifesto sounds so wonderful and some of it is almost impossible to implement.There are even special pledges which PH promises will be solved in 100 days.A participant argued to us that "the weakening of the country's economy is the fundamental reason for people's dissatisfaction with this government.Indeed, I believe there has been some development progress under the incumbent's government, but overall, I personally believe that issue was able to be capitalised on by the PH to win the people's hearts" (INT2, similarly to INT4).Another participant also supports this argument, stating that "indeed, the economic issue became the major one.For sure, economically, the economy grows so slowly, but you also have to understand that the case of 1MDB also contributed to influencing the shift in voter political behaviour" (INT3).These participant responses are similar to the arguments of Torcal (2014) and Ravishankar (2009) as well as (Dassonneville & Hooghe, 2017) on the importance of economic performance for the re-election of the incumbent.Another issue that also needs to be considered is the changing political role of the Malaysian Chinese, which also contributed to the political power shift in Malaysia.The weakened political support of the Malaysian Chinese to the BN government is another factor in the BN losing their majority power in parliament.Furthermore, the weakened political support of the Malaysian Chinese to the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) is due to various reasons.First, the MCA is unable to be a prudent political medium for the Malaysian Chinese in the Malaysian political landscape.It influenced the fact that the "Chinese voters … voted overwhelmingly for the opposition" (Moniruzzaman, 2013, p.55).As a result, this phenomenon has been detrimental to the political role of the MCA as the biggest Malaysian Chinese-based party in Malaysia.The political weakening of the MCA has therefore impacted on the diminishing political role of the BN coalition in national politics; even though it was not really significant, the MCA lost eight seats in the parliament, and overall BN lost seven of their national seats in the 13 th GE, for example (Weiss, 2013a, p. 1138).The trend of diminishing political power for the BN continued in the 14 th General Election.Many academics believe that the diminishing political role of the BN only occurred in the 13 th GE, but this assumption is incorrect when the result of the 14 th GE skewed all previous predictions.BN was defeated by the PH, and the BN coalition lost the majority vote in the election for the first time were far from the people's expectation.People have their own standard for assessing government performance; they often compare the current government with the advanced achievement gained by the Mahathir leadership.It seems that Mahathir's legacies became a standard of successful leadership for his successor, one that was not able to be met by Najib Razak's government.One of the participants said that "the political leadership of Najib Razak in the last 10 years has had less impact than his previous leadership.I believe the 1MDB issue somehow clouded his performance" it came to bringing Malaysia's foreign policy closer to that of China, rather than other countries such as the US, the UK or Japan.This could be analysed as the consequences of Chinese government domination in Malaysia, especially in infrastructure development projects.It could also be understood as the impact of the emerging Chinese economic hegemony across the globe.When analysing the foreign policy agenda, it can be seen that there is a slightly different style of leadership between Najib Razak and Mahathir.Indeed, Mahathir's foreign policy seems anti-western by standing with the Look East policy, of which choosing to move closer to China could be interpreted as a part.This policy did not mean Malaysia is also close to the western superpower countries; there was no balanced foreign policy in Najib Razak's government, the internal politics of Malaysia, which is so fragile when it comes to the contested ethnic politics between the three dominant ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese and Indian.Domestically, a closer relationship between China and the Malaysian government was also capitalised on by the MCA leader to raise the party's popularity with Malaysian Chinese voters.In contrast, this also contributed to the revival of sentiment among the Malays over China, including a global campaign on the 'style' of the Chinese government debt.One participant argued: "I believe the closer policy over the Chinese has at least two consequences: the rising sentiment over the Chinese and the fairness of not paying the Chinese debt".(INT2) THE UNCERTAINTY FUTURE OF MALAYSIAN POLITICS Prior to the 14th GE, BN was expected to win a two-thirds majority in Parliament and PAS to lose all their parliamentary seats, based on a survey by Invoke (think tank of PKR/PH).This was clearly just a psychological war to win the vote, as the election result showed a different outcome.The result demonstrated a significant swing in favour of PH.The fence-sitters or the silent majority seem to have played a crucial role in the election results.Mahathir, as PH's Prime Ministerial candidate, pulled several of his hardcore supporters from the UMNO to PH. Knowing Malay politics had split further -UMNO to Semangat 46, followed by PKR and later PPBM -they only needed to split the Malay votes equally among BN, PAS and PH.The collaboration between UMNO-PAS, which had almost caused BN splits before, seemed to cause 'collateral damage' to most of the BN component parties.The worst scenario would be failure to reach an understanding with PAS, for a one-on-one match with PH caused vote splits and gave an advantage to BN.Based on the GE14 results it was estimated that UMNO-PAS could win around 98 seats if they could reach an agreement or one-to-one understanding with PH.The 14 th GE is more about who the Malaysian voters do not want, not who they want.This was mostly contributed by the roles played by the new media.The character assassination of Najib Razak has really worked favourably for PH.The rule of the law that one is innocent until proven guilty does not seem to apply to BN (only to PH), as most of them have been portrayed as guilty even before going to court, while all accusations against PH leaders were seen as slander by the BN government.Many things seemed to go wrong from the very beginning of the PH government, apart from too much ministerial focus on when Mahathir should hand over the prime premiership to Anwar Ibrahim.First, Mahathir Mohamad conceded that the government may not be able to realise all 10 promises in 100 days, as pledged in the PH manifesto in July 2018.PH claimed they did not expect to win the GE14, which caused them to produce an unrealistic manifesto.The 14 th GE result was a blessing -an opportunity for PH to walk the talk, to show to all Malaysians that they could do better than BN, or that Mahathir could do better in his second spell as Prime Minister than in his first 22 years (1981-2003) in the role.This includes returning the Sabah and Sarawak rights, 20 percent of oil and gas royalties to Sabah and Sarawak, Sabah and Sarawak as equal partners, etc.Unfortunately, in the first 12 months we have been overshadowed by the lame excuses the government has made about 'cleaning up' all the damage caused by the previous government.PH always pledge the Rakyat to give them more time as it is impossible to rectify 55 years 'damage' in a few months.to this, a Malaysian specialist has explained to us that "the style of government will not change … the important change is the openness processes … [there is] an ideological commitment … the local level has not changed yet" (INT4).Furthermore, one point that could be discussed in the context of the current political shift in Malaysia is the democratisation process that resulted in Malaysian society being more open and beginning to evaluate the performance of the government.This could explain why the Malaysian government under Muhyiddin is so far relatively successful in coordinating government agencies, especially with the federal government, for example in dealing with COVID-19.In some ways, this is indeed a good signal of the improved governance processes in Malaysia.Furthermore, the defeat of the BN is political evidence that their conservative style of politics has been challenged by the new aliran politics in Malaysia.The current landscape of Malaysian politics is demanding political progress rather than rhetoric about ethno-politics and its discontent.This argument is supported by Mohamad (2008), who claims it is a symptom of the weakening role of ethnic politics in Malaysia .A further question has come to public attention: does the PH bring a new hope for a better Malaysia?There are various factors which could help to answer this question.Indeed, it is not an easy task for a particular country to recover politically and economically in one period of government administration; see, for example, what happened between Mahathir and Muhyiddin.But we assume that the elite consolidation process needs more than one period of leadership, and the 15 th GE will be the real battle for PH regarding whether they will be able to maintain their position in power or not.One of our participant was pessimistic about PH's ability to maintain their power in the upcoming election: The PH possibly is not able to deliver all its election promises.That is due to its internal and external factors, as well as the manifesto itself not being based on comprehensive research.The internal factor is mainly caused by the Mahathir party itself.It is another UMNO, with old culture.At the same time, PH still needs Mahathir.Mahathir too is now trying to strengthen its small party, which seems to be growing fast.I would consider this now as a state of political uncertainty.(INT1) From this narrative we could learn that the shifting of Malaysian political power brings new hope for the increasing maturity of Malaysian voters, especially the hope to make Malaysian politics more democratic (Noor, 2020).People are now starting to vote more rationally by punishing the incumbent government for being involved in corruption scandals and for underperformance.This argument is supported by one of the respondent, who told us "one thing that I can say is that Malaysians are getting wiser in choosing their government, thus it depends on how one government performs" (INT3).Finally, the current politics of Malaysia is extremely uncertain and volatile owing to King's request to Muhyiddin Yasin to step down and law maker have then appointed vice president of UMNO, Ismail Sabri Yakoob as the new prime minister.Will BN return to power?how long the new established government will retain in power?The Malaysian Politics is once again unpredictable.The opportunistic and transactional attitude of Members of Parliament will determine the future of Malaysian Politics.CONCLUSION Prior to the 14 th GE, many believed that the opposition would not have a chance to win the election owing to unfair elections and the capability of the BN government to capitalise on their state resources, especially for manipulating the final election result.The Malaysian election has been full of intrigue and manipulation for some decades: for example, the BN government could use the party machinery to convict the voter (Ostwald, Schuler, & Chong, 2019), and the electoral commission (Suruhanjaya Pilihan Raya) could be influenced by the government's power as well as gerrymandering strategies.But these assumptions were undermined in the 14 th GE, as the wave of political change is too strong in Malaysia.Secondly, our assessment has shown that certain fundamental political and economic factors can lead to the defeat of a ruling government.Those issues were the 1MDB corruption scandal linked to Najib Razak and his government during the campaign, the implementation of progressive Good and Service Tax (GST), the rising cost of living, the China-oriented foreign and economic policies, and Mahathir's popularity.being re-elected (Torcal, 2014).However, Hirano and Snyder (2012)'s and Torcal (2014)'s arguments need to be refined by consideration that in the context of Malaysia, where the official media was captured and dominated by the BN government, these factors need to be supported by progressive new media in disseminating information to the public.