INTRODUCTION

A lot have been published on the subject of democracy in Malaysia, yet there are few comprehensive survey-based academic studies on how Malaysians view the state of democracy, and, even rarer, in relation to election management and the country’s Election Commission (EC). Welsh (1996) on political attitudes among Malaysians in 1994 was one such study and based on a survey of 400 respondents, while the study by Muhammad Fathi Yusof et al. (2015) on public perception towards the EC is based on a small survey of seven questions among 1,104 respondents in 2014/15. Periodic and systematic international surveys on democracy have been conducted by the Asian Barometer of Democracy surveys, and Malaysia has been included since 2007 during its Second Wave Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). Thus far, three working papers or report with a focus on Malaysia have been produced from the ABS (Welsh, Suffian and Aeria 2007; Welsh Suffian and Aeria 2008;Welsh 2014). Otherwise, outputs from ABS have been in the form of cross-country regional studies among several Asian countries which include Malaysia (Chang, Chu and Welsh 2013, Chu, Welsh and Chang 2013, Huang, Chu and Chang 2013; Ikeda 2013; Lu 2013; Mujani and Liddle 2013; Park 2013; Wang and Tan 2013; Chu and Welsh 2015; Kang and Lee 2018). While cross-country comparative studies are useful in contextualizing political perception in Malaysia within an international context, they do not provide a detailed understanding of Malaysians’ perceptions on the EC and other state institutions, the management of elections, and the state of democracy.

This report is an analysis of the findings from a nationwide survey conducted with 2,627 respondents between March and April 2021. The objectives are to find out how Malaysian citizens evaluate the performance of the EC in managing elections, perceive the neutrality of the EC, and also how they perceive the state of democracy and of political authorities in the country. As the EC is one of the fundamental institutions in the operationalization of democracy, i.e., in conducting popular elections, public perception of its performance and function is best understood in the general context of the latter’s evaluation of the state of democracy and perception of the legitimacy of state institutions as a whole.