Urban Development Categorisation of Parliament Seats in Malaysia

The list of Parliament seats in Malaysia by urban development category can be found here.

For further reading on the methodology please read this blog post.

The categories are:

• Rural = villages (kampungs) / small towns / farmland distributed within the seat. Rural seats tend to be physically large with a low population.
• Semi-urban = larger towns and/or numerous small towns, may include villages as well
• Urban = cities where a majority of the seat is covered by some form of urban development

This classification was done by us based on Google Maps satellite imagery and SPR maps. This is not the same as SPR’s own internal classification of seats. You can find our reference maps here (link).

We have obtained a gridded map of Malaysia that defines persons per square kilometre, based on a grid cell size of 19 square kilometres. This population estimate is based on an extrapolation of the 2000 National Census. This map will enable us to :

• Estimate the size of the constituency
• Estimate the min, max and average population density
• Define a range of rural, semi-urban and urban categories, instead of just three
• Perform seat classification at the State Assembly Seat (DUN) level

However this is time consuming and will likely take months to prepare. A sample of the Peninsular Malaysia map is shown below, rendered as a heatmap ranging from Green (low population density) -> Yellow -> Orange -> Red -> Purple (highest population density). The SPR maps are overlaid over it, and by toggling visibility we can identify which cells belong to which constituency. For area calculation we can subdivide the 19 square kilometre grid into 4.75 or 1.1875 square kilometre grids, depending on how small the related constituency is.

Coverage: (Yahoo News) How is social media affecting the 13th Malaysian general elections?

Published on May 1st, 2013 (link to original story) (Indonesian version)

by Susan Tam

Malaysia’s political landscape is facing one of the most fiercely contested elections in history, and you’re able to witness this through the displays of hundreds of flags, buntings and banners as well as from the noisy ceramahs of the various parties vying for your vote.  Well, the ‘noise’ levels on cyberspace similarly, has gone up with the rise of social media usage.  We decided to find out what it all means by having a chat with social media research firm, Politweet. 

From 2,400 people tweeting about politicians in 2010 to 450,000 users chatting about politics on Twitter, three years later.

That is how much Malaysia’s Twitter base has grown, reflecting how much the interest in politics has grown too.

We spoke to Politweet’s Ahmed Kamal to find out if the noise being made on social media should matter in the upcoming elections. Politweet is a non-partisan research company that specialises in the analysis of interactions of Malaysians using social media.  One of the goals of the firm is to develop a set of tools for other researchers and journalists to analyse social media.

“The social media usage has definitely increased.  We have one to two million Twitter users in Malaysia and over 13 million Facebook users, with over nine million of those above 21 years old.

“In 2008, people mainly turned to blogs for political information. Today the conversation seems to have moved to Facebook and Twitter.”

Seeing this is a technological age, and that more people are getting connected, it’s a no-brainer that more Malaysians have created Twitter or Facebook accounts so they could keep up with the trends.  But what has that done for political parties, particularly during hot election campaign periods?

Ahmed, in his research, finds that like its political rival, BN is making use of Facebook and Twitter in its political campaigns. The ‘problem’ though, lies in how they are using it.

“You don’t have many supporters that are having conversations with users and trying to build up that rapport (with users) to convince them to switch over to your side. Instead they are trying to employ methods, like flooding the channels with links to articles or blogs or news about what BN politicians are doing.”

That is a different style to how PR is using these tools to connect to their constituents.

“Maybe they don’t have as many paid people doing it, but whatever (PR) supporters they do have, they are usually strong and they will invest time in conversations that help to change people’s minds.”

He is certain of the fact that BN and PR use this new medium differently in their efforts to spread their political messages, which affects the results of the research on social media.

But who is winning this battle?

Ahmed does not even see an even playing field to begin with, for these two alliances.

“It is very hard to measure the competition between PR and BN.  Based on the tweet levels (of both coalitions), BN does not seem to be trying very hard.”

Normally, in political campaigns, BN would lead PR by big margins in terms of mentions. But the results this time indicate both alliances are close to each other.

“It does give me the impression that they (BN) have shifted their attention towards traditional media instead of social media.”

There is a sense that BN could be falling back on the ‘old’ media or traditional media to push their messages, which is something that Ahmed did expect.

With close to 10 million Facebook users possibly becoming first time voters on May 5, we wanted to find out if this was a wise strategy.

Ahmed feels BN isn’t pushing social media as ‘hard as they could’, and people can see their messages through the many billboards, buntings and newspaper advertisements displayed across traditional channels. PR does not have the resources to do the same.

“It does seem like a battle between old media and new media, but we won’t know how effective this is until after the elections.”

He was quick to point out as well that being very popular on cyberspace does not necessarily translate into votes for politicians or parties.

Prime Minister Najib Razak trumps Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim in the number of Twitter followers, despite having a larger number of inactive followers or ‘manufactured accounts’.

Based on Politweet’s census done in February, Najib’s has 1.2 million followers, with only 48% being active accounts.

Anwar has 236,000, with a higher percentage of active accounts of 61%.

But if you break down the numbers, Anwar’s genuine 144,000 followers are tiny compared to Najib’s 582,000.

Ahmed Kamal finds that Najib’s popularity is also the driving force behind BN’s overall popularity. PR on the whole has 59% active followers, compared to BN’s 43%. But, if you take Najib out of the equation, it could mean a different scenario.

According to reports, Ahmed Kamal joined PKR in 1999 but was inactive after that year’s elections. He worked for Anwar in 2007 and did some freelance work for PR after March 2008.

He now focuses on remaining non-partisan and began monitoring social media trends in 2009.  Politweet’s detailed research can be found here (http://www.politweet.org/site/main.php).

The Rural-Urban Divide in Malaysia’s General Election

108 out of 133 seats won by Barisan Nasional (BN) came from rural seats. 72 out of 89 seats won by Pakatan Rakyat (PR) came from urban and semi-urban seats.

While it is true that PR won every Chinese-majority seat, there are only 30 Chinese-majority seats in the country. That leaves at least 59 seats won with the support of other races.

When comparing Malay-majority seats, PR won more seats than BN in both semi-urban and urban categories. A Malay-majority seat cannot be seen as a guaranteed victory for BN.

In terms of the popular vote, BN obtained 57% of the popular vote in rural seats, 47% of the popular vote in semi-urban seats, and 36% of the popular vote in urban seats. Looking at the winning majorities of individual seats, the probability of BN regaining urban seats is low. This gap in the popular vote is illustrated in the infographics at the end of this post.

That is the picture of the political urban-rural divide. BN represents the rural majority and can retain power with rural and semi-urban seats alone. This election highlighted PR’s weak areas which are rural seats, Bumiputra Sabah majority and Bumiputra Sarawak majority seats.

Predictions for Malaysia’s General Election #GE13 #PRU13

The following is a set of election result predictions based on 5 scenarios. These results were obtained by running simulations of registered voters in the 2012 Q4 electoral roll casting their vote.

The calculations that drive the simulation are based on each voter’s voting preference in the previous General Election (2008). The detailed methodology for this analysis will be explained in a future blog post.

In 2008, the election results were unexpected and resulted in a big victory for Pakatan Rakyat component parties. This voting pattern will be referred to as the ‘tsunami effect’. Our simulations are based on the following rules:

• voting preferences and turnout probability for each voter remain the same as they did in 2008. This was calculated as a probability based on lane (saluran) results from the last election
• voting preferences for new voters are based on their peers – individuals with similar characteristics (age, race, location) in the electoral roll
• a change in preference (swing) applied to each individual depending on the conditions of the scenario
• there are only 2 choices – Pakatan Rakyat (PR) or Barisan Nasional (BN).
• PR can be interpreted as ‘any party that is not part of the BN coalition’. This is especially true for Sabah and Sarawak.
• the independent candidates do not receive any votes – due to time constraint this factor from the last election could not be included in the simulations

For each scenario we ran 200-500 simulations for each of the 13.29 million voters. Essentially the vote is simulated by answering 2 questions based on probabilities and swing:

1. Will I vote?
2. Who will I vote for?

Out of 5 scenarios, PR wins at most 106 seats.

Apart from swing factors stated in each scenario, other factors that affect PR’s victory / loss in these simulations are:

• New voters being registered
• Old voters from 2008 being removed from the roll
• Voters transferring between constituencies

The list of seats won by PR for each scenario are listed below, along with the minimum and maximum winning majorities.