Behavioral Science Research

by Johaan

Just a few years ago, the world's longest-serving elected coalition collapsed.

On the morning of May 9, 2018, millions of Malaysians did something their government had quietly calculated they would not do: they voted.

The Barisan Nasional coalition (BN) and its predecessor, the Alliance, had governed Malaysia for sixty-one years, since independence from British rule in 1957.

By nightfall, that rule had ended.

The U.S. DOJ’s “largest kleptocracy case to date”

The story begins with money. Staggering amounts of it.

Between 2009 and 2015, approximately $4.5 billion USD was misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) — a state-owned sovereign wealth fund established by then-Prime Minister Najib Razak. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) would later classify 1MDB as its largest kleptocracy prosecution of all time.

This financial fraud was exposed by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope at The Wall Street Journal, whose investigation was possible only because it was published under the shield of American free speech protections, placing it beyond the reach of Malaysian censorship law. When the reporting reached Malaysia, the government reached for a familiar, tightening toolkit:

• Official Secrets Act 1972

• Sedition Act 1948

• Communications and Multimedia Act 1998

• Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984

Legislation had long been deployed as a weapon against journalists and organizers alike. The Peaceful Assembly Act 2012, for instance, required police notification before any assembly –– handing authorities power over every protest in the country.

One Court of Appeal panel struck down the criminal penalty for non-compliance, while another reinstated it. By the 2018 election, the law remained mired in legal limbo, condemned by the Malaysian Bar Council for violating Article 10 of the Federal Constitution—the provision guaranteeing citizens the right to free speech, assembly, and association.

Then came the Anti-Fake News Act 2018. Rushed into law weeks before polling day, it imposed criminal penalties for publishing information the government deemed false, effectively leaving the definition of "truth" to the very individuals the reporting was about.

Democracy Inside a Panopticon

Political dominance relied on more than legislation and information asymmetry. Courts, electoral boundaries, and media ownership functioned as an enmeshed system engineered to reinforce incumbency.

This system ran on belief.

Citizens learned to assume they were being watched because political surveillance was periodically made visible; punishing dissent taught the public that opposition was recorded, costly, and futile.

Where belief reached its limits, arithmetic took over. Through systematic malapportionment, the Election Commission drew maps on which a sparse rural seat carried the parliamentary weight of a sprawling city, setting the math of victory before a single ballot was cast.

Enter Ambiga Sreenevasan.

Recipient of the U.S. International Women of Courage Award in 2009 and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Medal of Honor in 2023, hers is a career that stands as a record of Malaysia's democratic conscience. As the second woman ever elected President of the Bar Council, she used this platform to lead thousands of lawyers in the Walk for Justice — a march that forced a Royal Commission of Inquiry and permanently established the nation's Judicial Appointments Commission.

She converted institutional pressure into grassroots mobilization as Chairperson of BERSIH, a coalition of dozens of civil society organizations (whose name is the Malay word for “clean”). Under her leadership, the BERSIH 2.0 movement reclaimed the streets, orchestrating some of the largest rallies in national history challenging the geometry of electoral authoritarianism.

During our in-depth interview, the former Bar Council President offered a stark assessment: Malaysia "has never invested in a free and fair media at any point in its history" –– something she argues is "a pillar of any democracy." What the country had instead, she said, was "propaganda-based control over the mass media and print press."

Choice Engineering

On April 10, 2018, polling day was announced: Wednesday, May 9. The choice of day was presented to the public as merely administrative.

It would be Malaysia’s first Wednesday election since 1959.

Behavioral science distinguishes between "nudges" — choice architectures designed to encourage a behavior (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) — and "sludge": unjustified friction that impedes access or discourages action.

The Malaysian workday election was not an accidental inefficiency; it was the intentional application of state-sponsored sludge designed to weaponize the cost of participation.

The regime manufactured a collective action problem. As Mancur Olson posits in The Logic of Collective Action (1965), the greater the individual cost of participation, the less likely large-group mobilization becomes, even when the stakes are enormous. In other words, the regime calculated that inconvenience would do what censorship could not: keep opposition voters home.

It did not work.

To formalize the struggle between state-engineered friction and citizen-led mobilization, I applied the Riker-Ordeshook Calculus of Voting (1968), which demonstrates how voter turnout is a behavioral response to competing variables:

Counter-Infrastructure

If the regime's friction was engineered top-down, the response was assembled from the bottom up.

In my interviews with Fok Wai Mun and Lee Wai Hong, they credited citizen-led infrastructure and growing internet access as crucial to the opposition’s victory in Malaysia's fourteenth general election (GE14).

Malaysia's digital infrastructure was already deep before the campaign began: by the third quarter of 2017, broadband penetration stood at 84.5% per 100 households, smartphone penetration at 70%, and mobile-cellular penetration at 131.8%, per Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission data.

This was the standing substrate the counter-infrastructure ran on.

The pair, with Gan Sue Ling, Wong You Jing, and Timothy Teoh, built digital scaffolding that thousands of voters climbed to reach the ballot box: PulangMengundi.com ("Return Home To Vote"), #UndiRabu (“Vote Wednesday”), #CarpoolGE14, and the GE14: Postal Voters group, which enabled volunteers in countries as far afield as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia to hand deliver diaspora ballots home safely.

PulangMengundi.com alone connected more than 10,000 Malaysians and matched over RM100,000 from donors to out-of-town voters requiring travel subsidies, while decentralized networks like #CarpoolGE14 simultaneously converted free rides, cash subsidies, and peer coordination into turnout machinery.

Wai Mun attributed the scale of this ecosystem’s impact to “a shared feeling of disenfranchisement” among Malaysians.

The Fogg Behavior Model holds that a specific behavior (B) occurs only when motivation (M), ability (A), and a prompt (P) converge simultaneously (B = MAP; originally formulated in 2009 as B = MAT, with "trigger" later restated as "prompt").

The regime's strategy was a textbook attack on variable A: the 1MDB scandal made it impossible to reduce the population’s motivation, hence, by raising the cost of participation, it bet that even even motivated citizens would fall below the action line. The postal voting system was sabotaged through a mandated 11-day campaign window, leaving an impossibly narrow margin for ballots to be dispatched and returned by courier. Diaspora voters were structurally excluded by design.

As citizen-led networks worked variables A and P from the other side through a digital ecosystem, the regime’s reaction to these efforts was a confession in itself.

The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab identified more than 17,000 pro-government bots generating over 44,000 pro-government posts (in just the span of a week). This fits Freedom House’s broader documentation of Malaysian pro-government cybertroopers used to shape online political discourse.

Joe Lee, who launched the #PulangMengundi (#ReturnHomeToVote) campaign, said the hashtag was overwhelmed by thousands of bots that he and others manually reported over a grueling three-day window.

The outcome defied the regime's models. Despite manufactured friction, GE14 recorded over one million additional votes cast compared to the previous general election.

Voter turnout reached 82.3% despite the structural suppression. While variations in registration systems and electoral norms make any cross-country comparison imperfect, the United States (a mature democracy with arguably lower barriers to voting) has not approached 80% national turnout in a presidential election since the nineteenth century.

Six decades of manufactured incumbency had not, in the end, been enough.

That outcome was the work of two converging populist forces. The people had advocated and organized their way to the ballot box. But the opposition also had a figurehead: Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who served as Malaysia's Prime Minister for twenty-two years under BN — the longest-serving leader of the very system now being dismantled.

The symbolism was irresistible: the architect of the system had turned against it.

His return gave the opposition a populist with name recognition in every village, and a face that rural and older voters trusted. The us-versus-them narrative against the disgraced Najib Razak pierced through even the most fortified information environments.

Limits of Revolution

Shortly after Najib's regime fell and Mahathir became the world's oldest elected head of government, I was invited to a UN General Assembly side event in New York held in the new Prime Minister’s honor.

The mood was triumphant, and the room told a clean story with one man as its protagonist. That framing troubled me. His role was real, but the narrative erased the data: this victory was built by the behavior of millions. It also obscured the inheritance. Decades-long policies institutionalizing ethnic preference and subordinating evidence-based public health to religious conservatism did not vanish with the fall of one kleptocrat.

Young people under forty made up roughly 41% of the GE14 electorate, and those in their twenties proved decisive in more than a third of all seats.

I questioned the Prime Minister about how he would address Malaysia's historic neglect of sexual education, which contributes to one of the highest rates of baby dumping in Southeast Asia. Sexual education, he told me, was incompatible with schools in "our culture."

Invoking a single, undivided "culture" in one of the world's most religiously diverse nations is self-exempting erasure. The very knowledge he branded incompatible was knowledge his grandchildren received in international schools, even as public schools were denied it.

The exchange made it clear that behavioral sludge was the outermost layer of a deeper architecture. Ordinary citizens dismantled friction at the surface; but structural exclusions beneath it — ethnic, religious, institutional — remained substantially intact.

Proof came fast.

Less than two years after the historic victory of 2018, the reformist government collapsed in what became known as the Sheraton Move: a political maneuver executed from within the coalition, without a single citizen’s vote being cast.

Why This Story Matters

The 2018 Malaysian election is on one level a story about technology. At a deeper level, it is a story about information: who controls it, who is denied access to it, and what becomes possible when those controls fail.

Decentralized information networks are a structural vulnerability that kleptocracies cannot engineer away.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting on 1MDB demonstrated that from the outside. From within, what Ambiga Sreenevasan, Fok Wai Mun, Lee Wai Hong, and millions of Malaysians proved in 2018 is that socially architected behavioral sludge is not destiny.

Manufactured friction can be countered.

Information monopolies can be circumvented.

Even sixty-one years of hegemony can be undone by ordinary people armed with truth, community, and the courage to act.