KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia has kept its 40th spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global Democracy Index 2023 with an overall score of 7.29 and is the highest-ranked country in Southeast Asia.
It also ranked sixth in the Asia and Australasia category, just behind New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
Malaysia also scored 9.58 for its electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government (7.50), political participation (7.22), political culture (6.25), and civil liberties (5.88).
The country also falls into the “flawed democracy” category, where it is defined as having free and fair elections and basic civil liberties respected. However, there are significant weaknesses in other aspects of democracy, including problems in governance, an underdeveloped political culture, and low levels of political participation.
Other Southeast Asian countries are – Timor-Leste (45), the Philippines (53), Indonesia (56), Thailand (63), Singapore (69), Vietnam (136), Laos (159), and Myanmar (166).
Asia and Australasia are home to five “full democracies”, 10 “flawed democracies”, five “hybrid regimes” and eight “authoritarian regimes”.
Dropping eight spots to 63, Thailand was also singled out as the index reported that its outsized political influence of the military means that elections are far from being free, fair, or competitive.
According to the report, the anti-establishment Move Forward Party (MFP) won the most votes in the 2023 general election, but under the military’s sway, Parliament failed to endorse the MFP’s leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, as prime minister.
“The subsequent ruling by the constitutional court to disqualify Pita as a member of parliament, on a controversial charge of his share ownership in a media company, dashed the MFP’s hope of forming a government. The rules regarding the democratic transfer of power are clearly not established or accepted in Thailand, and the judiciary is not independent,” it added.
Other “losers” were Pakistan, which dropped 11 places in the index to be reclassified as an “authoritarian regime”, and Sahel and West Africa.
The Nordic countries (Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) continue to dominate the Democracy Index rankings, taking five of the top six spots, with New Zealand claiming second place. Western Europe was also the best-performing region in 2023, being the only region to record an increase in its index score.
The Democracy Index is based on the view that measures of democracy that reflect the state of political freedoms and civil liberties are not thick enough. They do not encompass sufficiently, or, in some cases, at all, the features that determine how substantive democracy is.
Freedom is an essential component of democracy, but not, in itself, sufficient. In existing measures, the elements of political participation and the functioning of government are taken into account only in a marginal and formal way. – February 15, 2024