Political ideology in Malayasia: reality and the beliefs of an Elite

Malaysia, endowed with a comparatively large stratum of educated, Westernized personnel both inside the government and outside, has maintained a democratic system of rule for more than a decade. In an at tempt to define and account for the basic patterns of political ideology among Westernized elites of new nations, James C. Scott examines the attitudes and beliefs of seventeen randomly selected Malaysian civil servants who have assumed positions of government leadership since independence. Adapting Robert E. Lane's well known techniques of in-depth interviewing, Mr. Scott explores his subjects' basic value orientations toward human nature, nature itself, and time, and finds that a distinctive conception of political life and politicians emerges. A collective view that man is by nature inclined toward asocial self seeking contributes to the desire for firm rulers who can enforce community-serving behavior. The orientation to nature assumes a fixed scarcity of desired material goods; in this context cooperation and com promise are difficult, and distributive justice rather than service is the focus of political evaluation. This quality of the environment is such that short-run personal goals are more readily realizable than long term group goals. Mr. Scott analyzes the political implications of asocial competition for resources that are conceived to be limited and suggests that in much of the non-Western world neither the rate nor duration of growth in per capita real income has been sufficient to transform the politics of scarcity into the politics of affluence. The author concludes that the tendency toward asocial competition in non-Western coun tries is not only characteristic of transitional societies but represents a realistic appraisal of their economic situations, rather than a pathological response to colonialism and rapid social change, as has been previously asserted. Support for liberal democracy is comparatively low among Malaysian elites and tends to crumble when more important values, such as unity and stability, are threatened. Support for a paternalistic, authoritarian regime, however, is wide spread since the assumptions such rule. makes about the environment are congruent with Malaysian realities-communal tension, illiteracy, narrow loyalties, the elite's monopoly of modernizing skills. Mr. Scott's argument demonstrates why new nations must achieve an expanding social product if they wish to encourage the atmosphere of trust and cooperation essential to the growth of liberal democracy.