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

## TL;DR

The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo) is a new open-access database compiling detailed election data from 1955 to 2025, enabling better research and civic engagement in Malaysia.

## Contribution

MECo is the first comprehensive open-access panel database of Malaysian federal and state election results with standardized candidate and constituency-level data.

## Key findings

- MECo includes data from 9,704 electoral contests with standardized identifiers for candidates, parties, and coalitions.
- The database contains demographic candidate data and summary statistics like voter turnout and majority size.
- MECo is described as the most well-curated open database on Malaysian elections to date.

## Abstract

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.