The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal and State-Level Election Results from 1955 to 2025

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Thevananthan, Thevesh
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Thevananthan, Thevesh
author_facet Thevananthan, Thevesh
contents Empirical research and public knowledge on Malaysia's elections have long been constrained by a lack of high-quality open data, particularly in the absence of a Freedom of Information framework. This paper introduces the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access panel database covering all federal and state general elections since 1955, as well as by-elections since 2008. MECo includes candidate- and constituency-level data for 9,704 electoral contests across seven decades, standardised with unique identifiers for candidates, parties, and coalitions. The database also provides summary statistics for each contest (electorate size, voter turnout, majority size, rejected ballots, unreturned ballots), key demographic data for candidates (age, gender, ethnicity), and lineage data for political parties. MECo is the most well-curated open database on Malaysian elections to date, and will unlock new opportunities for research, data journalism, and civic engagement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06564
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal and State-Level Election Results from 1955 to 2025
Thevananthan, Thevesh
Computers and Society
Applications
Empirical research and public knowledge on Malaysia's elections have long been constrained by a lack of high-quality open data, particularly in the absence of a Freedom of Information framework. This paper introduces the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access panel database covering all federal and state general elections since 1955, as well as by-elections since 2008. MECo includes candidate- and constituency-level data for 9,704 electoral contests across seven decades, standardised with unique identifiers for candidates, parties, and coalitions. The database also provides summary statistics for each contest (electorate size, voter turnout, majority size, rejected ballots, unreturned ballots), key demographic data for candidates (age, gender, ethnicity), and lineage data for political parties. MECo is the most well-curated open database on Malaysian elections to date, and will unlock new opportunities for research, data journalism, and civic engagement.
title The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal and State-Level Election Results from 1955 to 2025
topic Computers and Society
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06564