From what I've read (and this may very well be outdated), Singapore is generally democratic, but the PAP does such a good job of running the country that people don't vote for other parties.
replyPAP has exploited Singapore's strict libel laws to bankrupt opposition parties by suing for defamation. It is not so difficult to retain power when the opposition has no money for campaigning.
replyYeah we've heard that before from people who turned out to be filthy liars. Not saying it is impossible, the Singapore numbers are borderline plausible, but if the leading party gets more than 60% of the vote I'm going to assume shenanigans unless I've seen some pretty strong evidence beyond what a propaganda department would put out. People don't agree with each other all that much.
replyOpposition 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’s interesting. They’re “cheating” a bit at least. They have these things called Group Representation Constituencies: multiple people represent a single constituency but you vote once for the team. So they’re clearly using this to up-weight areas they guarantee and to release ethnic cohesion voting (each team must have minority members in it). Interesting tricks that don’t require ballot stuffing etc.
replyIt 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.
The Chinese Communist Party and United Russia might say the same thing.
replybeen in China for decades, benevolent dictatorships allow long term planning, elections every 4 years favor short term decisions, populism and waste a huge percentage of time in after elections and pre-elections
replyChina and Singapore showed democracy is not necessarily the most productive way to run a country
The election happening once in a while helps ensure if the long term planning is still aligned with the population, because, new people will be born and some others will ‘age out’, the original long term planning might no longer represent the voice of this new set of population.
replyA country shouldn't be a factory. It doesn't need to be "productive".
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