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Comment by seanlinmt | Hacker News Reader

Singapore is a strange outlier among successful democratic countries. There's always stories that are untold. For example,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Chin_Siong?wprov=sfla1

Operation Spectrum untracing the conspiracy' https://share.google/2mRpZk3RGaYUKCRXS

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It's not really a proper democracy, the same party has ruled since the founding of the country.

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".

Trump is testing the limits of USA democracy every day, just from the top of my mind: top lieutenants worth 5%+ ownership in Thether holding company, Ivanka's husband with the Saudis, Ivanka herself in the ONU, shameless plugs of crypto tokens and cards in the podium after elections, pardons for criminals

democracy failed America

Winner-takes-all democracies all suffer of the same issue.

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.

I think you'll find America failed democracy.

I think a reading of Roman history shows the failure modes of a senate so often that I wonder if it was ever supposed to work more than a few hundred years.

> 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".

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.

>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.

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.

One problem is that many bureaucrats seemingly underperform in the public eye, but continue to have job security as long as they have the favour of the leadership.

"He was one of the founders of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), which has governed the country continuously since independence"

Very democratic country.

I have no idea and probably not, but it is a bit more complex than that. There isn't any particular rule saying that the only functional democratic model is multi-party democracy. One could imagine a successful democratic model with one party allowing diverse internal factions, for example. It is really hard to get a read on China, but their success raises some interesting questions of how exactly their internal party decision making is set up.

That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.

been 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

China and Singapore showed democracy is not necessarily the most productive way to run a country

A country shouldn't be a factory. It doesn't need to be "productive".

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.

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.

Yeah 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.

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’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.

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.

It's pretty common in countries that don't have strong democratic traditions. Democracy is just as much a culture as it is a political system.

The Chinese Communist Party and United Russia might say the same thing.

PAP 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.

That's largely PAP propaganda. The sentiment on the ground is divided into these groups:

1. (an increasingly smaller portion) The PAP has done this well thus far and brought us to the first world 2. (a large portion) The PAP has too much power and can silence all its opposition - I don't want to suffer the consequences it has historically delivered upon its detractors by voting against them 3. (an increasingly larger portion) The PAP is good but it has too much power and has been allowed to engage in rampant authoritarianism and ivory tower bullshit - the opposition politicians would do a better job 4. The PAP is unequivocally bad and should never be in power (due to their historic actions like underpaying the Malay population for their land, operation Coldstore, etc.)

Additionally, the government blatantly engages in any tactics they can to get more votes, with documented widespread gerrymandering, holding snap election dates right after major PAP wins to capitalised on increased positive sentiment without giving opposition parties time to prepare, silencing/deplatforming opposition politicians, and enacting laws that prevent anyone but their chosen caste to be elected to positions of power

Singaporean here.

The PAP has ruthlessly gerrymandered their way into winning an overwhelming number of seats in recent elections. Most constituencies are Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) [1], which mean that many new PAP candidates can enter by riding on the coattails of a higher-profile veteran.

In 2025, the PAP emotionally blackmailed Singaporeans into voting for a Deputy Prime Minister [2] who was shifted to an at-risk GRC, with promises to navigate Singapore through the US tariffs that came to naught (my eyes are rolling so hard at writing this statement).

The PAP effectively controls the electoral boundaries, because the chairperson of the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee [3] is the Prime Minister's secretary, and the other members are all career civil servants who are incentivised to not rock the boat.

If the opposition had been allowed to contest in 2025 again with 2020's electoral constituencies, they would more likely have had far better results [4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_representation_constitue...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Kim_Yong

[3] https://www.gov.sg/explainers/what-is-the-role-and-compositi...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1jay630/how_did_...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1k6n1ps/another_...

As the article points out, Lee Kuan Yew did not believe that democracy meant that his (or any other party in power) should also help opposition parties politically thrive. While such political philosophies can be abused by authoritarians (and Lee was an authoritarian) in a democracy, I do see the wisdom in it. For example, Nehru - India's first Prime Minister - invited even some opposition leaders into his Cabinet as his party got an absolute majority in the first election post-independence. That was a rare departure from the convention of a Parliamentary Democracy, where only members from the ruling party or coalition form the Cabinet. Nehru however wanted to promote democratic values in India and since his party didn't really have an opposition, he invited some into the Cabinet to ensure their voice would have prominence in the media and the public. But he later abandoned this practise because the political ideological differences made this untenable in practise.

Competitively authoritarian, so, democratic.

If Singapore isn't a democracy then the U.S is a dictature.

Merit remains the foundation of its ruling style, the other, whatever suits the mood of the ruling power behind democratic labels and institutions that ultimately have violated its own constitution.

People throw out the word democracy like they know what it is.

Did you know Philippines adopted American style democracy and were much more wealthier than Singapore and other Asian countries?

How do you think Philiippines compare now to Singapore as a result of its "democracy" ?

It's not a democratic country. If it was then so is China and North Korea. They hold elections too

Singapore has been described as a "managed democracy". There are genuinely free elections, and there's an actual opposition, but the government/ruling party (they're largely inseparable at this point) exerts a heavy hand to ensure they keep their supermajority.

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.

In comparison, another country considered to be a ‘flawed democracy’ also have governments exerting a heavy hand in redrawing the election map (even getting to Supreme Court) to ensure they keep their majority.

"Over the following decades, Lee built a strong government that was backed by a competent and virtually corruption-free civil service..."

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.

The idea that Singapore isn't corrupt is one of the biggest lies of all time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m7xrd2z0o

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/spanish-couple...

I don't think you know what the definition of corruption is. According to Merriam Webster the definition is:

> 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.

Ok, I will bite.

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?

That's not corruption.

The corruption is not as blatant as you will see in other nations, and it works to make people believe the lie that its not corrupt, as you can see in the other thread in the replies to your comment.

The way corruption manifests in Singapore is legally and baked into the system - we are a city smaller than NYC but have _five_ mayors, none of which an average citizen can name or even have heard of having a mayor. Party politicians sit on the boards or occupy high C-suite positions of major companies and collect salary from all of them. Government politicians and high-ranking civil servants enjoy the best quality of life possible in Singapore, funded by taxpayer dollars, and barely have to do any work for it once they are in the position due to the single party system and only having to vote along party lines to keep it.

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