Rejoinder: The Authors Respond to “Interpreting Ethnicity and Urbanization in Malaysia's 2013 General Election”

Abstract

In this article we respond to Thomas Pepinsky's commentary on our article “2013 Malaysian Elections: Ethnic Politics or Urban Wave?” (both in this issue). We confirm that both ethnicity and urbanization play important roles in determining the incumbent ruling party's percentage vote share in the thirteenth general election. In doing so, we address the various econometric issues raised by Pepinsky and clearly explain the advantages of our econometric methodology vis-à-vis the OLS analysis espoused by Pepinsky. Our main results indicate that Barisan National's (BN) vote share from Bumiputera voters, regardless of urbanization levels of the parliamentary constituency, is below the 50 percent threshold. This result is surprisingly compensated by the more than 50 percent support for BN when Chinese voters are a small minority of the electorate. We also argue that Pepinsky's statement that Malay voters are predominantly rural voters is inaccurate and provide evidence to the contrary.