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How much do we really know about how political parties operate? A new pilot study by UKM and collaboration with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy introduces Malaysia’s first Political Parties Transparency Index, which evaluates five major parties across several indicators. On this episode #ConsiderThis Melisa Idris speaks with Dr Haris Zuan, Research Fellow at UKM’s Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), and Ooi Kok Hin, Country Director, Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
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00:10Hello and good evening. I'm Melissa Idris. Welcome to Consider This.
00:14This is the show where we want you to consider and then reconsider what you know of the news of
00:18the day.
00:19How much do we really know about how political parties operate?
00:23A new pilot study by UKM, in collaboration with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy,
00:30introduces Malaysia's first Political Parties Transparency Index,
00:35which evaluates five major parties across several indicators.
00:40Joining me to discuss both the study and the scorecard of these parties,
00:44I have one of the co-authors of the study, Dr Haris Zwan,
00:48who is a research fellow at UKM's Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, better known as ICMAS.
00:55I also have Ui Kok Hin, who is the Country Director for Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
01:01Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Very good of you to join me.
01:04Let's learn more about the Political Parties Transparency Index.
01:08I'm going to begin with you, Haris, if I may.
01:09Sure.
01:10Introduce us to this index. What is it trying to measure?
01:13And why do you feel that this assessment of political parties is necessary?
01:19What gap are you trying to address?
01:21Thank you, Melissa, for having me in this show.
01:25Well, this Political Parties Transparency Index, not just looking into financial accountability,
01:31but also looking into internal party democracy, which is we look into how decisions are made within the party
01:38and how leaders are elected and whether the members can participate
01:41and how meaningful their participation in that process.
01:45We also look into the public outreach, how the political party access the public
01:50and then towards extend the public have access to the political party
01:55and how they communicate their campaign and program to the public.
02:02That's the core dimension that the study looked into.
02:07This index actually adopted from the North Mesodinia.
02:14They have conducted this index before and this partly is a benchmarking process
02:22where we try to see to what extent that this index can reflect Malaysia's situation.
02:31I noticed that in the report it said that this is the first of its kind.
02:36Why is it that you think we've had so many of these kind of like governance transparency index
02:42but we've never actually drilled down to look at how political parties are operating.
02:47Yeah, that's a good point because I think in Malaysia we always focus on individual persona
02:53rather than the institutions, institutionals.
02:58So I think we have been talking about institutional reform
03:01and we always miss out this political party as one of the institutions that needed reform.
03:09So this is why we have this and I'm glad that WFD approached UKM to systematically assess how transparent and
03:22accountable this political party in Malaysia.
03:26So why did WFD think this was an important issue to put political parties on the table and look at
03:34how they operate?
03:35Because like Harith said, I think many of us don't see political parties as part of the institution until they
03:41win elections and become government.
03:43Then we hold them accountable.
03:44I mean, those are legitimate questions.
03:47I think maybe we take a step back when you think of let's say companies, put aside political parties, but
03:51just think of private entities, companies.
03:55At a certain point in time, maybe a small company can run among family members.
04:00But when you grow further, you need to have organizational practices that are effective, sustainable and very well run companies.
04:06And the same, you know, assessment or the same mindset, I think it should be developed when we look at
04:12political parties.
04:13It should not be just, you know, as Dr. Harith mentioned just now, you know, association of political parties with
04:19certain party leaders, personality driven.
04:21Whether it's PK, Anwar, Muda, and Sadiq.
04:24I think the parties themselves, some of them are trying very hard to move beyond personality driven.
04:30And I mean, recent news about Sadiq Sadiq not contested in the Muda election.
04:34So you have new leadership, probably, and so on, right?
04:37So this is why WFD came up with the, you know, political party transparency index, PPTI.
04:43I know it can be a quite mouthful.
04:45As Harith mentioned, it was first pioneer in North Macedonia.
04:48So WFD for context is a UK public body.
04:51We operate around 30 countries in the world.
04:53So this study has been done in North Macedonia and has been done in Nigeria.
04:57So Malaysia is actually the third country and the first in this continent to do this study in here.
05:03So we look at about, I think, 75 indicators.
05:05Yeah, Dr. Harith.
05:0675.
05:07Yeah, 75 indicators spread over three categories.
05:09The first category is internal party democracy, which looks at, okay, how competitive is the party?
05:16Does the party allow context for leadership at the top level?
05:19And so on.
05:20The second criteria is about financial transparency.
05:23So that looks at, let's say, your donation, donor disclosure.
05:27How well is the finances managed in the party?
05:30Not just about donation, but how the party manages its finances.
05:32Just like any other private companies, right?
05:34How do you run it properly?
05:36And the third one is about public outreach.
05:38That means how accessible the parties are to the public.
05:41Can public find information about your leaders?
05:45Personal correspondence, can they contact your leaders?
05:48And so on.
05:48So these are very basic sets of indicators.
05:51And the reason why we developed this, not just to look at parties as institution, which we mentioned earlier, but
05:56it's also so that we have some sort of international benchmarking of how parties operate and others can access the
06:03political parties accordingly after this and so on.
06:05Okay.
06:05I like this.
06:07This is all resonating with me because I think we want to kind of go through all the report card,
06:12the scorecard of the parties.
06:13But we have five parties, DAP, PKR, Amanah Bersatu and PAS.
06:19One big one missing is UMNO.
06:22Where is UMNO in the list of the parties that you assessed?
06:26Haris?
06:27Yeah.
06:28I think we need to aware that this is just a pilot project.
06:33Okay.
06:34That one.
06:35And we have some limitation on this, but we hope that when we are able to launch the full scale
06:44of the project, we will include not just UMNO, but also East Malaysia Party.
06:49Yeah, the Borneo Party.
06:50The Borneo Party, the regional party, which is not included in the study.
06:53Yeah, we are fully aware of that and in fact, he also mentioned in the full report part of the
06:59recommendations.
06:59Were you engaging the political parties as part of the study or was this done just as an outside observer?
07:07Oh yeah.
07:07In terms of methodology, we done our desktop research first.
07:12Okay.
07:12Then we also engage with the at least at the Central Committee Leader to verify and to consult with them.
07:19So after that, we also have these sessions where we tabled the preliminary findings to them.
07:28Oh.
07:28To get that feedback and clarification.
07:30We do that.
07:32Okay.
07:33End of last year.
07:33And in terms of you mentioned about scorecard, well, it's not surprised that across the board, the highest score just
07:43slightly above 40%.
07:45So.
07:47That's not even a passing mark, right?
07:49Is it a passing mark?
07:50Yeah.
07:51Depends where you put your passing mark.
07:52Okay.
07:54All right.
07:55So 40% was the highest score.
07:57Yeah, brilliant.
07:58Can you walk me through some of the scores based on the three pillars?
08:02Were there, did you want to go through each of the pillars or, let's start with financial accountability because I
08:07think that's really, that's an interesting point to begin.
08:12How did the parties do in terms of financial transparency?
08:17Well, yeah, that's the most obvious.
08:19I think that's the weakest pillar across all parties.
08:23Partly because we don't have the political financial act that regulate party funding yet.
08:30So, but it also reflect the political culture in Malaysia where we hardly discuss on that.
08:39I think that's why we need this study to show to the public that, hey, this is something that we
08:45need to discuss.
08:47But, in terms of public outreach and internal party democracy, their score is not that high.
08:57For example, for internal party democracy, yes, there is some level of democracy and empowerment.
09:03But, I would say that across party that participated in this study, all of them relatively, in terms of decision
09:12-making process, are very centralized.
09:14I think that's not, then in terms of public outreach, well, most of them really focus on social media presence.
09:26But, they are not, they are not emphasized the party itself, but rather than their leaders.
09:33Yes, so it's very personality driven, right?
09:36Very personality driven.
09:36Each person, each personality or each elected representative has their own website, their own social media presence.
09:43And, interestingly, many parties neglect their institutional website.
09:49So, if you hardly need to find some information in their official website.
09:55So, it shows that communication today revolves around individual leaders rather than parties as institutions.
10:02Okay.
10:03Alright.
10:03Let's go through the political transparency, which across the board performance was not great.
10:10I think I'm curious, I want to explore more about why this is important.
10:15Like, maybe the idea that we don't know where money is coming from and how money is being spent in
10:23political parties is an area of concern, Kohen.
10:28What does it tell you that across the board, parties were quite weak on this pillar?
10:33Yeah.
10:33So, I think maybe let's tackle the question of why this matters in the first place, right?
10:38So, imagine if you were to marry a person and this person cannot even handle his own finances.
10:45His house is messy.
10:46You walk into the door.
10:47I don't know if you guys watch Friends.
10:48There's one episode in which, you know, it's the one with the messy room.
10:51You enter a date's house and it's like, wow, the clothes are everywhere.
10:55If that person cannot get his own little house in order, can you trust him to manage the government?
10:59And I think this is the, you know, perhaps an app analogy to think that if political party leaders do
11:05not manage their own organization properly, how will they behave when they are in government?
11:10When they manage a much bigger size institutions.
11:14And, you know, we talk about finances.
11:16I think that's also worrying if finances and also internal party democracy, right?
11:20If, you know, if they cannot manage dissent in their own party, that means there are some factions or leaders
11:27that disagree with them and they just put sideline.
11:29They don't allow for contests at the highest level of leadership.
11:33Then, when they are in government, when they have the tools of the state apparatus, when they have the police
11:38and the MCC under them, what do you think they're going to do with public, media, journalists, reporters who disagree
11:44with them?
11:45I think that's quite telling.
11:46Okay, so warning signs is indicators.
11:49So it's kind of like, you know, manage your own household in order and stuff.
11:53I think Haris mentioned about personalization in terms of the party, right?
11:59But I think this also applies in finances.
12:01I think one of the interesting findings, I think Haris and the co-author Ramzi, Dr. Ramzi, credit to him
12:07as well.
12:07They have this term in the report, which you can download for free on the WFD website, political party transparency
12:13index in Malaysia.
12:15They have this term called black box.
12:17When they come, they use the concept of black box to describe political party finances in Malaysia.
12:21Like in aviation?
12:22Like in a plane?
12:24Yeah.
12:24Like box of a plane?
12:25How would you describe it?
12:27Haris?
12:30Yeah, the reason why we call it black box is because it's systemic lack of financial transparency.
12:40So, all five parties scored below 30% in the financial accountability pillars.
12:46So, yeah.
12:50That's really bad.
12:51If I may tie that black box thing and also the personalization argument, the finances at the party level as
13:00an organization,
13:00the money doesn't have much money in there.
13:02The money is taken by a few party leaders.
13:05So, it's the personalization of the finances as well.
13:07And that's how you create a warlord system, the patronage system in the parties.
13:12Because the money is not with the political party HQ, the finance.
13:16It's held by certain personal leaders.
13:18That's why it becomes very personality driven.
13:20I think that's one of the, you know, one of the worrying signs of a patronage democracy as well.
13:26That's a really good point, I guess.
13:28And then also that leaves room for mismanagement and abuses, right?
13:35Because when it's held by political personalities or political leaders, the power dynamic is skewed,
13:45becomes concentrated and maybe open to abuse.
13:49So, were there parties that performed better than others or was it dismal across the board?
13:55I hate to say this.
13:56Let's break it down for the five parties that you looked at.
14:01We looked into PKR, DAP, Amanah Bersatu and PAS.
14:05Okay.
14:06But let me put it this way.
14:08The whole project is not to penalize the party.
14:11Understood, understood.
14:13So, rather than try to work with them to improve the transparency standards.
14:16It's like a benchmark like you said, right?
14:17It's a benchmark.
14:18So, at least we know that we are somewhere and how we can improve together.
14:22Okay.
14:22So, I think we need to have that.
14:25So, you're coming to it with good intentions with the party.
14:30Yeah.
14:30Partly for the project itself.
14:33Partly it's an empowerment to the political party themselves.
14:37That one.
14:37Secondly, I think it's to the public to appreciate the needs to understand the importance of political party to be
14:44transparent and accountable.
14:49Ultimately, I think voters are not aware how important political party are.
14:56Ultimately, this political party is the one that decides who will become the candidates, who will become the YB, who
15:02will become the ministers.
15:03And later on, they're the one who influence our public policy.
15:08That's why I think at the really beginning, we need to have how to empower the political party together.
15:14Yeah.
15:15So, you mentioned something about the concentration of power, determining who the candidates are, where they run, and essentially who
15:23will get elected into cabinet, right?
15:27What did it reveal to you, your research into this, when you looked at how party decisions are made?
15:35Talk to me about the implication of having such centralized decision making in the diversity of the candidates.
15:44Because I'm just looking at it from a gender perspective, but there's also the age dimension, right?
15:50How many young leaders are given an opportunity, Harris?
15:52Yes.
15:54Yes.
15:55Yes.
15:55You picked the main issue here, where we can see that I think all the political parties have
16:05issues with meaningful participation, and not all of these youth and women have chance to participate in mainstream agenda issues.
16:21So, I think the formal structure such as women and youth wing can create pathway for broader participation and leadership,
16:30but it's not always translated into real decision making power.
16:36And actually, by having these wings, just simply add another layer of hierarchy.
16:45Because the wings are meant to, say the women's wing, they're meant to pressure party leadership to maybe field more
16:55women candidates.
16:56But it's not always the case, isn't it?
16:59Okay. Yeah.
17:00So, the national agenda always left to these all boys to decide.
17:07And women and youth, you have your own wings, you have your own issue, deal with that.
17:13Leave it the real issue to the all boys.
17:16So, it's always the case.
17:18Yeah.
17:18So, that's part of the findings.
17:21Yeah.
17:22I mean, I completely agree.
17:23There's this, you know, I hear it from another researcher saying there's something like a typecast.
17:28You know how if you are in Hollywood, if you look Asian, you will play a certain role, right?
17:32So, same as well, to some degree.
17:35Tokenism.
17:35Yeah.
17:36Unless you are Rafida Aziz, stuff like that.
17:38When you are a woman in politics, you are being typecast to, let's say, you know, family and development portfolio,
17:43right?
17:43It's not a heavyweight portfolio.
17:45It's not finance.
17:45It's the whole ministry and so on.
17:48So, I think we have never had a woman home minister or woman finance minister, if I'm not mistaken, right?
17:54So, I think there are areas like that that are definitely, you know, we could definitely explore more, you know,
18:00hopefully future incarnation on reports.
18:02But I also want to mention that these 75 indicators also actually provide a very practical ways for the political
18:09party leaders to improve governance in their party.
18:12So, it can be used as a benchmarking, but it's also, it's very bullet points, right? 75 indicators.
18:17It's like a checklist, isn't it?
18:19So, if you don't have it, if you score low, just implement it and then, you know, you can get
18:23highest score next time.
18:25Just to give you a very simple example, right?
18:27When WFD, we organize some event and then we call, okay, environmental spokesperson from each party.
18:33In many parties' website, social media, there's no indication of who is in charge of the environmental portfolio.
18:40There's no indication.
18:41You have to really go and call people, you know, by right, I think you should have on your committee,
18:47in your website that,
18:49this is the environmental bureau, this is the labor bureau.
18:51Oh, almost like an ex-school member council.
18:55Yeah, very simple, right?
18:56So that, I mean, it's also a good way to train them.
18:59Not to say like as a shadow minister or anything, but as a shadow spokesperson for the party on this
19:03particular sort of issue.
19:05I think these are very doable incidents.
19:07In fact, even a much more simpler indicator, which is the existence of party official website, right?
19:13I won't name the party, but there's one major political party that the party went website down.
19:19I know because as a journalist, I often go to party websites and it's so not user-friendly.
19:26Yep, yep.
19:27It's missing forms.
19:28Yeah.
19:30I know which party you're talking about.
19:32Yeah.
19:32One last point about representation when you mentioned diversity, Melissa.
19:36You know, I think, although Muda is not covered in this report, I think we have to give credit to
19:40them in the sense of both youth and gender,
19:42they did much better than the mainstream party.
19:44Youth, I'm seeing their party election this weekend, I think most of the candidates are youth people.
19:50Not even don't have the youth wing or anything, but most central committee members are going to be youth.
19:55And they are also the first party.
19:56I think there is the president and the secretary general are both female.
19:59So I think, you know, if we were to include them in this report, they will score quite high.
20:04But of course, understandable in the sense that they have a blank canvas to draw from, whereas the rest, maybe
20:09less, much less so.
20:10Right.
20:11So I think this is the challenges that political parties face.
20:13Right.
20:14Just talk to me a little bit about the public outreach part, because I think that in your criteria, you
20:21had that, right, in terms of the assessment.
20:25I do wonder how to improve on that, because it is as important to be internally democratic, but also to
20:35be externally democratic.
20:36Meaning that you're engaging people who might be your voters or people who are, you know, critics of yours or
20:43concerned about some of the positioning.
20:46In a way, you're shaping political culture, voter culture, voters learning more about what your party stands for, how you
20:56feel about certain policies, beyond just statements made to the media or Facebook postings, for instance.
21:02What did you, what did you learn in your research about public outreach? Who does it, who does it well
21:07beyond the personalities?
21:10Haris, do you remember your, which party surprised you with their performance?
21:15I mean, yeah, to be, PKR and DAP did slightly okay with that in terms of outreach, most likely because
21:27they are quite, in terms of demographic, they are located in urban area and semi-urban, compared to PAS, for
21:37example.
21:39But having said that, the bottom line is, none of them scored more than 50%.
21:46You said you got some feedback from the parties. What were the feedback that you heard?
21:51And I'm curious to know how this might influence maybe the next phase of this index.
21:59Yeah. I mean, just on top of my mind right now, I remember there was, not to say a dispute,
22:05but a discussion on how do we count women in the Central Committee.
22:10So I remember in Bersatu and DAP, they were pushed back on how to score the number of women in
22:17the Central Committee.
22:18And I think in the report, we put asterisk to explain, actually there are different ways of counting, right?
22:23But it's just because we have to standardize it across the board for all the five parties.
22:27Otherwise, you know, we can't, we can't have different set of rules for different parties.
22:31So the rule that the researchers, Aris and Ramzi, landed on is the Central Committee as published on the website.
22:38So just to take one example, for example, DAP, when they publish the Central Committee on the website, it includes
22:43appointed members, appointed members and ex-official.
22:48So ex-official, they set in the Central Committee, but I don't think they have the voting rights, like elected
22:53Central CEC members, right?
22:55So if they count on, as published on the website, women has less than 30%.
23:02But of course, I think there were some representatives that were not happy, they said, no, we achieved 30%.
23:07Which is kind of a funny thing, if you look at purely elected CEC, they did achieve 30%.
23:11So when they achieved 30%, the appointed ones tend to come from non-women, and then overall percentage here jadi
23:19rendah balik.
23:20So it's kind of like an irony there, and of course DAP is not the only one.
23:23I mean there are other parties that I think dwell much lower on that score.
23:28Yeah.
23:30Yeah.
23:30I mean just to add to that, when we did our, when we presented our preliminary findings to them, of
23:40course they would question the indicators.
23:42Yeah.
23:44But having said that, these indicators are dynamic.
23:47In fact, part of the process, when we get feedback from this party, there is a process where we can
23:53refine this indicator to better reflect Malaysian political culture.
23:58Yeah.
23:58Yeah, the Malaysian context is so important here.
24:00Yeah.
24:00But at the same time, we must make sure that there's some level of universalisms where we can still benchmarking
24:10ourselves with other parts of the world.
24:13Yeah.
24:13Yeah.
24:13It has to have that right balance, right?
24:15You have the local context, but it has to be uniform enough that there is some international standards.
24:22Yeah.
24:22So we are very careful about not to apply straightjacket some Western standards and so on.
24:27Good.
24:27So we actually set up a call between the ICMAS UKM researcher and the North Macedonia and Nigerian researcher just
24:33to localize it a bit more.
24:35And we made it very clear to UKM as well.
24:37You don't have to straightjacket it.
24:38Just pick the one you think is applicable to local context.
24:41Okay.
24:42So the ones not so relevant to us, we will fine tune it.
24:45So in the couple of minutes that we have left, I want to know what the next phase is.
24:48So I hope that this will be expanded to include more political parties.
24:54But also, how are you thinking this could change the political culture in the country?
25:01Hopefully, it does spark some conversations within political parties.
25:04Haris, your work, what are you hoping as the next step here?
25:09Obviously, I think what we need now is to expand the scope of the index.
25:13So we want to have a nationwide that covers all the, at least main parties in Malaysia.
25:21We need that to better reflect our political situations in Malaysia.
25:27I think that that needs to be done.
25:30And secondly, I think we need to engage with political parties directly to empower them.
25:34So to see what they're doing well, what not, and how we can do these things together to improve for
25:40next year and in future.
25:43So I think this is a gradual process where we want to empower not just the public but also the
25:48political parties themselves.
25:50And hopefully, we can develop these benchmarking tools where others can also refer to.
25:57Yeah, it's really timely because we're in the kind of lead up to the next general election.
26:03So maybe people will come to the political party transparency index and then use that to see whether, who they
26:10should vote for.
26:11Ko Heng, your final message about your, the next phase of this index.
26:16I mean, everything Haris said, plus I hope that more political party members and leaders will use and reference this
26:22report to basically hold your organisation accountable and to improve the internal practices of your organisation.
26:29If you feel something is missing, just look it up there and then try to improve the processes within the
26:33party.
26:34I hope everyone goes and downloads this report because I think newsrooms and journalists themselves could also use this too
26:40in our reporting of how political parties are operating.
26:44Thank you gentlemen for being on the show, sharing some of your hard work with us today.
26:47Thank you for your time.
26:48That's all the time we have for you on this episode of Consider This.
26:51I'm Melissa Idris signing off for the evening.
26:53Thank you so much for watching and good night.
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