Very democratic country.
That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.
Opposition can literally just converge to the PAP positions over time. Or internal factionalism causes a schism and leads to 2 parties forming from one overwhelming ruling party. In political settings there are enormous incentives to set up roughly 50-50 coalitions.
It seems that Singapore/PAP figured out that policy control could effectively keep power without the violence traditionally associated with authoritarianism. I wonder what other dark arts they employ.
China and Singapore showed democracy is not necessarily the most productive way to run a country
How do you think Philiippines compare now to Singapore as a result of its "democracy" ?
If Singapore isn't a democracy then the U.S is a dictature.
People throw out the word democracy like they know what it is.
One of the big questions of Singaporean politics is what would happen if there ever was a "freak result" (in LKY's words) and the opposition won a majority, since thanks to the first past the post voting system further exacerbated by mandatory "group representative constituencies" the winner always wins big and coalitions or minority governments are not an option.
This part of the history, only mentioned in this one sentence, is the most interesting and relevant for other countries, and is really what sets Singapore apart from other countries in the region.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m7xrd2z0o
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/spanish-couple...
What does detaining someone over an unlawful (per the written law) protest have anything to do with corruption?
Corruption involves bribes, selective enforcement of the law, unethical favoritism when it comes to legal decisions, "favors", etc.
Your links just describe people participating in a protest that was against the law on the books, and then that law being enforced upon them. You can call that specific law unfair, undemocratic, authoritarian, etc., but what's the corruption angle here?
> a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers) : depravity
> b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery); the corruption of government officials
> c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct the corruption of a text; the corruption of computer files
> d: decay, decomposition; the corruption of a carcass
As far as I can tell the law was passed by the legislature, the police enforced the law, they weren't bribed to not enforce it or to enforce it.
Seems like the whole system worked correctly, legally and without corruption of any kind.
There are severe restrictions on speech, assembly, press and important legal and political barriers for the opposition parties. It is very easy to land in front of a tribunal for defamation or similar for expressing dissent or accusing the government of corruption.
The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
Lee Kuan Yew has been an astonishing nation builder and an extremely brilliant man with a huge sensibility for politics and understanding the world.
But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
I don’t think this is only by luck. Singapore made the decision to ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ so that they can build a career on it. This attracts more people to be a bureaucrat. The alternative is that only already rich people become politicians and bureaucrats or bureaucrats only getting their bag by joining lobbying firm after their time in government.
IMO, the hard part about implementing this ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ system is that it is often hard to determine the market rate as there are often no equivalent roles in the private market.
tbf that applies to all democracies, including genuinely competitive multiparty democracies. Would PAP accept defeat and cede power if they handled a crisis so badly an effective opposition party emerged? That's unclear, as is how many of their appointees would support them in that goal, though it is considerably more likely than nations which do not attempt to hold representative elections. But we've also seen the answer to questions of how much success will someone have in explicitly overriding democratic norms and revelling in open corruption be plenty in the United States with all its storied separation of powers and tradition of political freedoms, and perhaps more surprisingly he gave up quietly to wait for the next election was the answer to what would happen when a narrow majority rejected a guy who'd spent years turning Hungary into his personal fiefdom....
The other quirk about the PAP's paternalism is how many of their authoritarian type policies have been primarily driven by a culture of trying to avoid upsetting people, hence years of doublethink on homosexuality and newspapers being told that publishing aerial before and after photographs of Singapore's coastline might be a touch too provocative towards their neighbours.
democracy failed America
There's a reason why every single democracy to turn authoritarian in the last 60 years has been presidential or semi-presidential.
The only parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian since the 60s has been Sri Lanka, there's not a single other example.