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Clientelism and Control: PAP’s Fight for Safety in GE2015
Abstract
This article looks at the reasons the People’s Action Party (PAP) secured its decisive victory in the 2015 general election. The discussion examines the impact of the campaign and pre-election period on voting behaviour. While the opposition’s performance before and during the campaign reactivated its core supporters, the PAP’s control of the political narrative, rejuvenation of its grassroots machinery and effective use of resources provided an advantage that was instrumental in their electoral success. Most Singaporeans had decided how they would vote before the campaign began. Despite perceptions that the election was about the economy and the nationalist rhetoric associated with Singapore’s 50th anniversary and the passing of statesman Lee Kuan Yew, the argument in the paper suggests that the 2015 election provides insights into the breadth of clientelist politics in Singapore and how important state patronage and the control of the state are for holding on to political power in the city-state.
... The badge and slogan generated no attention beyond mention of its existence at a press conference. As expected, it did little to galvanize support, and the PAP won the 2015 elections with nearly 70 percent of the votes, its best share since 2001 (Lee and Tan 2016;Weiss, Loke, and Choa 2016;Welsh 2016). ...
Opposing Power argues that perceptions of regime vulnerability and mutual dependency by opposition elites shape the building of opposition alliances. When electoral autocracies are consistently dominant, opposition parties eschew fully fledged alliances. At best, they allocate only one candidate to contest against the incumbent in each subnational electoral district to avoid splitting the opposition vote. However, when multiple regime-debilitating events strike within a short period of time, thus pushing an incumbent to the precipice of power, opposition elites expect victory, accepting costly compromises to build alliances and seize power. Opposing Power shows how oppositions build these alliances through case study comparisons in East and Southeast Asia—between the Philippines and South Korea in the late 1980s, and between Malaysia and Singapore from 1965 to 2020.
... Singapore is identified as a flawed democracy (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2019), where while parliamentary elections are held periodically, free of irregularities and fraud, the ruling party has not experienced any real challenge towards its hegemonic domination since independence. The absence of a turnover in government and dearth in competitive party politics has been attributed to a slate of electioneering and punitive legislative devices (Welsh, 2016). As a critical part of political control, mainstream news media in Singapore operates in an environment closely structured and controlled by the state, and is thus partial towards the political status quo through more positive and greater coverage (Cenite et al., 2008). ...
This article presents a study of how civically engaged young adults engage with news on social media, within the context of a developing democracy – Singapore. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 young activists, it discusses how they approach social media as a source of news, what motivates them to engage in more than one social news platform, and how social news use fits into their political lexicon. The results reveal that despite their affinity towards news-related content on social media, they are neither partial towards mainstream, nor alternative news providers on this medium. Their primary social news platform is perceived to offer the best means to disseminate news-related information. However, they are also concerned about their privacy and practice certain strategies to mitigate this. Despite its drawbacks, the activists accept social news use as a viable means of political socialisation and mobilisation.
... We leverage novel data from a variety of other sources, which we describe in detail in our data section, to generate covariates that engage the work of numerous scholars of Singaporean politics and control for alternative explanations. These include candidate incumbency and challenger quality (Mutalib 2003); party and state grassroots infrastructure (Slater 2012;Welsh 2016a;Weiss, Loke, and Choa 2016); the demographic composition of electoral divisions (Rodan 1993); key features of the electoral system including district magnitude, malapportionment, and redistricting (N. Tan 2013; N. Tan and Grofman 2016); and policy positions. ...
The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of democratization theories? We argue that valence considerations—specifically, perceptions of party credibility—are the main factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate, and are critical to explaining the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to substantiate this argument, including a comprehensive quantitative analysis of recent elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits.
... We leverage novel data from a variety of other sources, which we describe in detail in Section 5, to generate covariates that engage the work of numerous scholars of Singaporean politics and control for alternative explanations. These include candidate incumbency and challenger quality (Mutalib 2003); party and state grassroots infrastructure (Slater 2012;Welsh 2016a;Weiss, Loke, and Choa 2016); the demographic composition of electoral divisions (Fetzer 2008;Rodan 1993); key features of the electoral system including district magnitude, malapportionment, and redistricting (Tan 2013;Tan and Grofman 2016); and policy positions. 2 We present the results of this analysis in 2 In addition to describing data and estimation techniques used to generate these covariates, we also provide an extensive set of supplementary appendices with lengthy discussions of data, estimation, and the results of cross-validation exercises. ...
The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of theories of democratization? We argue that valence considerations---specifically, perceptions of party credibility---are the dominant factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate and a critical piece to the puzzle of the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to demonstrate evidence in support of our argument through a within-case, historical analysis; a qualitative analysis of contemporary party competition and voter behavior; and a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the 2011 and 2015 general elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits to the advantages it confers.
While sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are making significant incursions into global financial markets, various countries are increasingly establishing funds geared towards national development. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the fastest-growing SWF, with most of its assets deployed domestically. Beyond restructuring the economy, deploying the PIF intrinsically implies balancing political and business interests. Yet, there has been little reflection on how socio-political relations with socioeconomic actors shape sovereign wealth allocation. Who gets access to SWF resources, and how? What kind of power relations are maintained or established in the process of SWF development? This article unpacks PIF activities to argue for a microfoundation of how domestic politics influence SWF decision-making. To do so, I introduce a sociology of SWFs using the tools of social network analysis. I find that the PIF mainly targets companies linked to family-owned conglomerates connected to merchant elites with long-standing personal connections to the Saudi state. This article contributes to rentier state debates and broader political economy scholarship by showing how beyond decision-making and asset allocation models, state investment funds also hinge on ancillary networks of social institutions, often generated from ingrained formal and informal interactions between states and society.
This chapter looks at how Singaporeans view the governance of the People’s Action Party (PAP) and finds that there are considerable differences in views. The focus is on three dimensions of governance—one party dominance, immigration policy, and Singapore as a ‘model’ of development, but it also includes assessments of other public perceptions of governance such as corruption. The analysis is based on the findings of the Asian Barometer Surveys of 2010 and 2014. Using a statistical multilogit model we explore who and why Singaporeans are divided on its development trajectory and find that there is considerable variation and inconsistency with regard to views of governance in Singapore. Despite this variation, the PAP is facing more pressure from the public to maintain its political legitimacy.
Singapore exemplifies what China strives for: resilient authoritarianism despite advanced development with good governance and political stability. But lessons Chinese observers draw from the Southeast Asian city-state have been selective, leading to misconceptions. We focus on three key areas in which Chinese observers claim inspiration from the “Singapore model.” The first, Singapore's “Asian values” discourse which is seen to provide an ideological defense of non-democratic rule, overestimates the impact of top-down conservative culturalism while underestimating the difficulty of propagating Confucianism in officially still communist China. Second, while elections in Singapore are seen to bolster the ruling People Action Party's legitimacy in Singapore, they have been implemented to such a limited extent in China that any legitimation gain is unlikely. Finally, the chief lesson derived from Singapore's fight against corruption, the importance of a committed leadership, ignores the importance of the rule of law in Singapore, a legacy of colonialism very different from China's post-totalitarian trajectory.
It is no secret that a dynasty has emerged as the ruling force in Singapore. The Lee family (of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) is referred to as ‘the first family’ as a matter of routine in private conversation, though not usually in public. Power has already passed from father to son and now there is a generation of high-flying grandsons in the wings. This article traces the establishment and consolidation of the Lee dynasty from the point in the early 1980s when Lee Kuan Yew emerged as the centre of all the significant power networks in Singapore, through to the consolidation of power in the hands of his son, Lee Hsien Loong, in 2011. In the process of doing this, it argues that despite official rhetoric that says that the country runs on the talent of the best and most talented men and women in the country, and the closely related myth that professionalism provides the basis of governance, the reality is that of rule by a family-based clique of confidantes and relatives. There is a strong element of reality to both myths, but both elements are ultimately subordinated to and in the service of the forces of consanguineous and personal networks.
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