INTRODUCTION

The study of Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) settler voting behaviour is nascent but growing. This chapter first outlines the national significance of the FELDA vote, concurrently surveying extant scholarship that has scrutinized the factors influencing FELDA settler voting decisions. It then turns to FELDA parliamentary constituency voting results in 2018, placing them in the context of three previous general elections—a longer term perspective that has been somewhat neglected in previous scholarship. Seen in this manner, the 2018 voting results in FELDA wards—defined here as parliamentary seats hosting at least one FELDA scheme—are both unusual in some ways, and not particularly remarkable in others. Four explanations for the decline in FELDA ward support for Barisan Nasional (BN) since 2004 are discussed: the popularity of Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) in northern Malaysia; ethnic disparities in voting patterns; schisms within the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), coupled with the rise of alternative Malay-majority parties and their champions; and the uneven distribution of FELDA settlements across Malaysia. To date, support for UMNO remains significant in some FELDA constituencies, but mostly in the southeast region of the Peninsula, where FELDA settlement clusters are especially dense.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FELDA VOTE

From the late 1950s to 1990, roughly 120,000 low-income households were recruited by FELDA into over 300 agency-led land development schemes, occupying over half a million hectares of farmland (Figure 9.1). Virtually no Malaysian state has been left untouched by these endeavours, save Penang, Sarawak, and the Federal Territories. The principal beneficiaries of these mostly rubber and oil palm cultivation schemes have been land-starved Malay households, supposedly selected on the basis of age, economic need, agricultural background, physical fitness, functional nuclear family unit, and prior military/security service (FAO 1966, pp. 18–19). Historian Tim Harper has noted that federally subsidized land schemes from the outset were also political creatures, not just in their underlying aims of rejuvenating the Malay rural economy, but as exemplified by the increasingly centrist bureaucratic structures used to perpetuate rural development, themselves the offspring of anti-Communist Emergency campaigns during the late 1940s and 1950s (Harper 1999, pp. 366–67).