Abstract
When thinking about Singapore and the People’s Action Party (PAP) that runs it, comparativists train their sights on single-party dominance and electoral manipulations. They observe too that for more than six decades, these practices have generated state capacity and legitimating cover. The PAP has mostly avoided the factional battling and rent-seeking that dog the political economies of neighbouring countries. It has instead maintained political stability and driven technocratic engagement with foreign investors. Today, in terms of per capita GDP, Singapore is among the very richest countries. Finding it hard to argue with success, comparativists thus identify Singapore as a rare instance in which authoritarian controls and statist initiatives have been ably deployed.
In his monumental history of the PAP from 1985–2021, Shashi Jayakumar broadly agrees with this thesis. But through exhaustive data collection, including interviews with national elites, a deep scouring of published and on-line sources, and access to heretofore classified archival material, Jayakumar adds immense empirical detail about the PAP’s top-level dealings, ground level operations, and its leaders’ reflections on the worth and conduct of elections.
Jayakumar is a former civil servant, holding appointments across sundry ministries. He has more recently turned his hand to academia and consulting. This hybrid background has given him favoured access to Singaporean officials and government documents, but also tempered the glowing hagiography that he might otherwise have produced. The result is an approving, yet critical account that illumines the PAP’s efforts to strengthen its policy performance and increase its margins of electoral victory. On this score, Jayakumar describes the party’s befuddlement over how these aims come sometimes to vary inversely, as well as its determination to impose costs on wayward voters. We see how blunt, even cranky, Lee Kuan Yew might be in dealing with critical audiences and constituents. We are struck too by the ruthlessness with which the PAP sometimes dumps its parliamentarians upon deeming them to have lost their street-level shine. And the party’s record has occasionally been punctuated by administrative lapses and breathtaking corruption cases.
But what most stands out in Jayakumar’s account is the continuous, indeed anxious self-reflection undertaken by PAP leaders as they strive to diagnose challenges and devise responses. In the first decades covered in this volume, the PAP focused on economic performance and living standards. Its policy aims thus centered on housing, transport, education, healthcare plans, and retirement schemes. Underlying these policy pursuits, the PAP strove also to ease structural tensions between Chinese linguistic groups, rivalries between ethnic communities, and resentments among citizens over foreign workers, whether labourers or executives, all the while navigating the precarity of Singapore’s positioning in the global economy.
However, even as it made gains on these policy fronts, the PAP incurred new kinds of discontent, with bountiful consumer markets and rewarding career tracks taken for granted by a new generation of citizens, oblivious to the city-state’s historic struggles and developmental record.
Jayakumar deftly captures Singapore’s present-day milieu, with many young people exercised over social issues and amplified by social media, now perceiving the PAP as remote and old hat.
At the same time, Jayakumar fairly reports the mounting sophistication and appeal of Singapore’s opposition vehicles, especially the Workers’ Party, led capably today by Pritam Singh and Sylvia Lim.
In assessing the PAP’s handling of piercing grievances and potent opposition, Jayakumar disabuses us of standard notions of rigid authoritarian controls. While comparativists acknowledge Singapore’s successes, they dwell on the bankrupting defamation suits and lastminute constituency redistricting that wrongfoots dissidents and opposition parties. They also focus on the PAP’s trusty old store of traditional regulations and penalties that hamper communications, assembly, and campaigning. In these conditions, they ask why the PAP even bothers to hold elections whose uncertainty the party so constrains? If its aim is to supplement other feedback loops with new insight into sentiments on the ground, it is only fooled by its own distortive manipulations.
But in what is perhaps this big book’s largest contribution, Jayakumar shows us that while the PAP has, of course, calibrated elections in order to ensure its return to power, it has left open a vast competitive space, then accepted losses in particular constituencies. Through elections, the PAP has sought genuinely to discover how persuasive its campaign mobilising, beyond everyday appeals and grassroots activities, might really be. In addition, the party’s election post-mortems, some of them documented by Jayakumar, evoke the clear-eyed objectivity with which the PAP appraises its own performance.
But more compelling than this is the PAP’s contemplation of additional competitiveness, to the extent that even in the earlier estimation of Lee Kuan Yew, ‘the day would eventually come…when the electorate would decide to vote the Opposition into power’ (paraphrased by Jayakumar, p. 555). What is more, in this progress, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, formerly a PAP minister, now Singapore’s President, has counselled against any rescinding of elections that go against the party: ‘(If) we really are at risk of losing because you’ve got a very capable Opposition in place, we would have an interest in them being as responsible as possible…’ Subsequent to its long record of single-party dominance and electoral authoritarianism, Singapore may yet emerge as a case of democratisation-by-elections.
Despite the book’s size, some of the PAP’s story remains unexplored. We are told much about the party’s deep introspection, popular mobilising, and electoral strategising. But while service delivery is cited as cementing the party’s appeal, very little is said about the vaunted economic strategies and pay-offs upon which this has depended. The PAP’s engagement with international investors, through its technocratic apparatus, receives little mention. Where globalised forces do appear, they are cast unrelievedly as political problems, primarily in the form of intrusive foreign workers and de-stabilising shocks.
The origins and dynamism of Singapore’s local capital are similarly cast in a dim and negative light. Emerging despite Lee Kuan’s Yew’s disparagement of their abilities and against the grain of Singapore’s statist strategies, private sector entrepreneurs surely deserve attention. Yet they are observed only in passing, mostly as shunning PAP nominations and public service, deterred, as they are, by modest salaries and social media attacks.
But these are petty complaints. Jayakumar’s history of the PAP is an important study, a decade in the making. It must be read by any analyst of Singapore’s single-party dominance and electoral authoritarianism, more meticulous than coercive, and the tantalizing prospects of change.
