Understanding Singapore Politics

Singh, Bilveer

doi:10.1142/10427

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…17 This regular turnover empowers the CEC and allows it to remove lacklustre or dissenting MPs, similar to the CPC which also recruits horizontally and experiences frequent turnover (Xie and Zhang, 2017). However, unlike the CPC’s turnover that is triggered by its formal retirement age of sixty-five (Wang and Vangeli, 2016), the PAP’s turnover is legitimised by its regular elections every four to five years and rhetoric for leadership renewal (Singh, 2017: 78). The PAP’s turnover promotes party loyalty because it (1) reminds MPs of the party hierarchy and more specifically that the party selectorate retains the right to nominate and select its candidates; (2) emphasises the continued need for loyalty and performance in order to ensure re-election; and (3) ties MP positions to the party and not local constituency support.…”

Section: Centralised Candidate Selection Turnover and Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimal Factionalism in Singapore’s People’s Action Party

Tan

2020

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs

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Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) is one of the longest ruling parties in the world. The PAP’s ability to avoid overt factionalism over the years is exceptional, especially compared to the region’s personalistic or cadre parties. In recent years, the defection of former PAP cadre Dr. Tan Cheng Bock and the formation of the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) and PM Lee Hsien Loong’s family rivalry, which involved PAP elites, have challenged the cohesion of the PAP. This study examines a set of incentives and constraints institutionalised at the party and national levels to foster elite cohesion. It is argued that the critical junctures in the PAP’s early years led to the adoption of a cadre party model and a centralised candidate selection process that co-opts like-minded elites into a core that promotes elite unity. Nationally, party switching and factional alignments based on ethnicity or ideology have been systematically banned. Given the lack of credible alternatives that seriously challenge the incumbent PAP, ambitious party cadres would do better toeing the party line and staying loyal.

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Section: Centralised Candidate Selection Turnover and Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimal Factionalism in Singapore’s People’s Action Party

Tan

2020

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs

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“…The bureaucracy has been shaped in the image of the ruling party, wielding its influence only as an arm of the party, unlike in countries where the ruling party alternates between two or more entities. In fact, many PAP leaders themselves came from the bureaucracy; the latter has always been seen as a useful breeding ground for aspiring politicians (Singh, 2017). The bureaucracy thus has a smooth relationship with the government, and the messaging from the ruling party rarely, if ever, differs from that of the bureaucratic machinery.…”

Section: Pap and The Bureaucracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Singapore’s Responses to the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Critical Assessment

Abdullah

Kim

2020

The American Review of Public Administration

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This article reviews how Singapore has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, from late-January to early May, 2020, through the three-phase approach to “learning”: in-between learning, trial-and-error learning, and contingency learning. Given its unique political system dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP) and bureaucratic culture, the Singapore government has progressively implemented numerous control measures including strict travel bans, contact tracing, “Circuit Breaker,” compulsory mask-wearing, and social distancing policies, along with financial relief to businesses and workers, in a very top-down fashion. Although the health and treatment issues of foreign migrant workers in dormitories continue to be the subject of ongoing debate among many scholars, it should be noted that the mortality rate in Singapore still remains very low compared to that of many other countries. Singapore’s case points to an important lesson that learning-driven coordinated strategic approaches matter for effective crisis management in the long term.

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“…In Singapore, competitive elections have allowed the PAP to achieve a high level of trust and legitimacy (Mutalib 2002;Tan 2013Tan , 2014Singh 2017), with the "normative and symbolic value of elections" serving to establish moral grounds for policy compliance (Morgenbesser 2017). This is reflected in the Edelman Trust Barometer, which finds public trust in the Singaporean government to have risen over the years to its current level of 70%.…”

Section: Legitimation Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemic, politics and pandemonium: political capacity and Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 crisis

Woo¹

2020

Policy Design and Practice

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Singapore's response to the Covid-19 pandemic has largely been seen as timely and effective, with border lock-downs and contact tracing efforts by city-state's policymakers serving to slow down the spread of the virus. Yet despite such efforts, there have been instances of panic and confusion among the Singaporean citizenry. These include "panic buying" of essential household items as well as the spread of fake news. In this article, I will discuss the Singapore government's efforts to address and minimize such behavior. I argue that the Singapore government's ability to maintain relative social stability is driven by its high level of political capacity. Two forms of political capacity are particularly relevant: coercive political capacity and legitimation capacity. In focusing on political capacity, this paper seeks to delineate the political systemic drivers of Singapore's efforts to manage the Covid-19 crisis.

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Understanding Singapore Politics

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Minimal Factionalism in Singapore’s People’s Action Party

Minimal Factionalism in Singapore’s People’s Action Party

Singapore’s Responses to the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Critical Assessment

Pandemic, politics and pandemonium: political capacity and Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 crisis

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