Election of the weekend I: Singapore

We’ve got three elections on tap for this weekend. We’ll start in Singapore, where they keep their elections on an impressively tight timeline. Singapore’s 14th parliament was dissolved on April 15, nomination day was April 23rd, and the election is Saturday, beginning in a few hours, if I understand the time zone situation correctly.

Singapore’s 97-seat parliament will be elected via 33 constituencies. 15 of those constituencies elect a single member; the other 18 are GRC (group representation constituencies), eight with four seats and ten with five, roughly proportionally allocated such that four and five seat GRCs are roughly 4x and 5x the size of the SMCs. Unlike most multi-member district schemes, voters choose between party slates, with only one party’s slate winning representation for all seats representing the district. The purpose of the GRCs, which were instituted in the late 80’s, is to improve minority representation, as every party slate must have at least one candidate who is a member of the “Malay, Indian, or other minority community,” as determined by either the presidential commission on Malay communities or the presidential commission on Indian and other minority communities. Both SMC and GRC elections are single round, first past the post.

Singapore’s politics have been remarkably consistent: The People’s Action Party, founded by Lee Kuan Yew, used to routinely win all the seats in parliament, and for the bulk of the GRC era, they’ve won 75-85% of the seats. (In 2020, they won 83/97 seats, with 61% of the vote.) While The PAP started out as a center left party in the 1950’s, then-new prime minister Yew purged the left faction of the party in 1961, which he justified with reference to the complicated politics of the ongoing merger with Malaysia. Four years later Singapore was booted from the Malaysian federation, and the PAP continued its drift to the right. To this day, while tolerating some competition, they rule as a de facto one party state; perhaps the best historical analogue is Mexico’s PRI in the post-revolutionary portion of the 20th century.

The PRI’s one party regime ended over two elections-1994, when they had to cheat so blatantly and obviously that it became deeply embarrassing and served to diminish the party’s sense of legitimacy, and 2000, when they no longer had the stomach to cheat enough to win. (One point of disanalogy that should be clarified, there’s no good reason to think the PAP cheats at the actual point of vote-counting, as they don’t need to; their one party regime has many undemocratic features, but open electoral fraud isn’t one of them.) Singapore has never had an election equivalent to 1994 or 2000, and they likely won’t this year. There are two opposition parties: The Social Democratic Worker’s Party (11%, 10 seats in 2020) and the centrist, pro-democracy and transparency Singapore Progress Party, founded by former PAP politicians (10%, 2 seats in 2020) are the opposition parties. Another PAP victory is a foregone conclusion, as the SPP is contesting only 13 seats and the WP only 26. A number of other minor parties and a couple of independents are contesting other seats but, but there’s no reason to think they’re serious contenders. The interesting question isn’t the outcome of this election, but rather whether there are any signs of a shift toward greater plurality in Singaporean politics. PAP went from 70% in 2015 to 61% in 2020, despite the general strength of incumbent regimes in the early COVID era. Whether that decline is a blip or an ongoing trend it probably the most interesting question this election will answer. PAP is hoping to improve on the lower-than-typical performance in 2020; we’ll see soon enough.