Sabah State Election 2020: Did the Electorate Vote for Change?

Abstract

After the defection of 13 elected state assemblypersons to former Chief Minister Musa Aman, Sabah’s Warisan-led State Government was forced to dissolve the state legislature on 30 July 2020. As many as 20 parties and 447 candidates took part in the snap poll on 26 September 2020, which saw the Warisan Plus coalition replaced by the Gagasan Rakyat Sabah coalition aligned with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Combing through electoral data, this paper finds three interesting facts. First, the Sabah election outcome was more a reinstatement of status quo in 2018 than a decisive shift of voters’ preference. Second, voters supported incumbents who changed parties as long as they were backed by main parties. Third, two out of five constituencies failed to produce majority winners despite the First-Past-The-Post system. Drawing insights from Cox’s (1997) framework on party reduction, this paper argues that concentration of executive power at both the federal and state levels made the election a contestation of incumbency advantage.