thevesh/meco-results

🇲🇾 Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal & State-level Election Results since 1955

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 (electorate size, voter turnout, majority size, rejected votes, unreturned ballots) for each contest, and key demographic data (age, gender, ethnicity) for candidates. This is the most well-curated publicly available data on Malaysian elections, and will unlock new opportunities for research, data journalism, and civic engagement.

This repository contains all datasets documented in the research paper.

I prefer Parquet (as any serious data person should), but have also provided CSVs just in case.

Features

• Compilation and validation of Malaysian election results (1955–present)
• Standardisation of candidate, parties, and coalitions with unique identifiers
• Lookup tables for extensibility

Citation

If you use this work, please cite it as:

Thevesh Thevananthan, "The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal and State-Level Election Results from 1955 to 2025", 2025.

@misc{thevesh2025mecoresults,
      title={The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Federal and State-Level Election Results from 1955 to 2025}, 
      author={Thevesh Thevananthan},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2505.06564},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CY},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06564}, 
}