ABSTRACT
This chapter raises three questions: what is the relationship between rent-seeking and money politics? What drives rent-seeking and money politics? How do these drivers affect the contestation for, and allocation of, rents? To answer these questions we first examine the meaning of, and relationship between, rent-seeking and money politics, and how both are manifested in Malaysia. We then critically review the dominant discourses on rent-seeking and money politics in Malaysia, which centre on ethnicity, cronyism (political patronage) and political business. These approaches offer insights into the practice of rent-seeking and money politics based on political capture by state bureaucrats or politicians, and focus on the relationship between patrons and their clients. However, the idea of political capture is centred on individual (political) actors and does not clearly identify the political basis of power or underlying changes in wider social relations which shape the allocation of rents, and which are manifested in ethnic politics and cronyism. An analysis of class and changing social relations draws from, and builds on, insights offered in the wider literature to offer an alternative explanation of rent-seeking and money politics in Malaysia. This analysis centres on changes in class formations and social relations related to the Malay middle class which led to the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and privatisation as the main vehicles for rent distribution and hence capital (wealth) accumulation.
