Here's an excerpt from my upcoming book chapter on Media and GE14 (14th General Election). The gist of the chapter is basically in the final paragraph. -- GE14 was reportedly to have scored a series of records in the history of Malaysian election, such as the first ever electoral win by the opposition, the oldest Prime Minister elected – and re-elected – into office, the first woman Deputy Prime Minister and the youngest cabinet minister. Apart from that, the other record was the rise of opinion polling and political forecasting “industry”. Unlike the United States, where one can easily find dozens of opinion polling results and forecasts by the media and research institutions, the trend of conducting opinion polls during election picked up rather late in Malaysia or that some of the polling conducted were only meant for internal consumption, such as those prepared by government agencies and political parties. According to Malaysia’s leading scholar in public opin...

"The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World" (Anchor Books, 2009) I have read this remarkable work by one of France's leading scholars, Dominique Moïsi, 5 years ago. It remains as one of the best books on contemporary global politics in my collection. But nothing quite struck me of how spot-on his views were, until recently; namely the Syrian refugee crisis, the rise of the far-right anti-immigrant parties across Europe, the global appeal of the IS terrorist group, the rise and the populism of the xenophobic Republican Donald Trump in America and most recently the British fear and anger behind #Brexit. To Moïsi, the three major global civilisations are represented by three important emotions; West; America and Europe (fear), Islamic (humiliation) and, India, China, East Asia and Africa (hope). It is grossly insufficient to only be focusing on Trump's racism and his personality alone without understanding...