Malacca polls show voters more forgiving of corruption than incompetence


DO political corruption scandals – which have become not only commonplace but institutionalised in Malaysian politics – hurt the political parties at the ballot box?

 

We are witnessing a paradox in Malaysia – unpopular corruption and popular corrupt politicians.

Going by the results in the just concluded state election in Malacca, it appears that despite multiple corruption scandals attributed to only a few members within only one party of 3.5 million members, voters would still not choose candidates of another party even though they disapprove the corrupt acts committed exclusively by the few members of the party.

This is possibly due to the fact that their overall awareness and understanding of the scandals falls short. It is also clear that doing or saying unintelligent things is no barrier to political success going by the results in Melaka.

Are Malaysians willing to trade-off some political corruption in exchange for good performance in other areas even though many politicians are clearly in it for themselves and their promises to do something unpopular, for example, raise taxes, cut spending and so on will never materialise?

The results in Malacca show that corruption scandals – even though all the cases were widely publicised and investigated and not obscure or hidden from the public eye – appear to do little to affect a party’s vote, and that voters tend to base their voting choices on other matters.

The public might prefer “clean” parties in theory.  Its political actions, however, appears largely uninfluenced by that preference. 

It appears that Malaysians choose candidates based on other matters, such as predetermined and often strong connections to parties and their personal preferences on a wide array of substantive policy issues.

The result is that although individual perpetrators of political corruption may be punished by voters, their co-partisans in the legislature have little incentive to police colleagues and prevent corruption from occurring in the first place.

In the Malaysian Parliament, involvement in a corruption scandal is by no means the end to a legislator’s political career, with almost 100% of those implicated in such scandals going on to win re-elections. So why do politicians get away with corruption for so many years? Because, even though they rob, they get things done?

How can so many politicians get away with corruption in our country? An increasing ideological polarisation, no doubt, helps the corrupt incumbents too. Or perhaps it is because members of one party that dominated our lives for the last 60 years enjoy substantial advantages over their challengers due to name recognition or campaign financing advantage?

Or biasness of the law and the press – a cursory look at corruption cases among rerunning politicians for the last 18 months suggest many serious infractions.

Logically, every rakyat would want an intelligent person who understands the best approaches and methods for running the country in the best possible way. But no, people seem drawn to demonstrations of questionable intellectual abilities going by the politics transpiring in the country since February 2020.

The Dunning-Kruger effect reveals that less intelligent people are usually incredibly confident. Confident people are more convincing. Used car salesmen, insurance agents, estate agents have exploited this for decades. And politicians are clearly aware of it, hence all the media training and public relations management. Any politician that doesn’t come across as assured and confident will have their political life cut short.

Politics, particularly democracy, requires people to be involved and as Malaysians are infamously uninformed about politics, they tend to be put off by intellectual and complex subjects, or they may have no experience with the issue, or may find it too daunting to want to engage with, because doing so successfully would require a lot of time and effort. 

For example, voters may feel they are actively influencing the outcome of an election, but, if some `knowledgeable type’ starts spouting big words about interest rates, unemployment or trust deficit in the management of the country’s healthcare, it will alienate those who don’t follow or grasp such things.

So, if a confident person says there’s a simple solution or promises to make the big, complicated thing go away, they are far more appealing to these voters.

This is also demonstrated by Parkinson’s law of triviality, where people will spend far more time and effort focusing on something trivial that they do understand than something complicated that they don’t.

As the majority of the people do love trivial things, less intelligent people condensing down the big issues into brief but inaccurate snippets are potential vote-winners.

Or, the majority of Malaysians really don’t like being told things they don’t want to hear and they have this need to feel superior to others in some way to maintain their sense of self-worth, and, as a result, someone saying things that contain uncomfortable but accurate facts isn’t going to appeal to them while they prefer someone saying simple things that support inherent prejudices and deny uncomfortable facts?

This is an unfortunate situation but it just seems to be the way people’s minds work and that’s no way to get people to like something, as should be obvious by now after the elections in Malacca.

The only hope then for political changes to occur would be for some sections of the elite willing to respond to the political opportunities generated by societal demand in this country. Not a change in leadership of the political parties. – November 22, 2021.

*FLK reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.


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