It's basically a benevolent dictatorship due to one party being in charge for the last 67 years.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
All true, but consider that most democracies today aren't really functional anymore. They impose more and more draconical surveillance and speech laws while failing to at providing livable economic condition to the next generations.
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
Also doesn't help that the people who most want power are those least deserving of it. See many CEOs, and many politicians in general.
Does Singapore work well so far? Sure, by some definitions of working well. Same with China.
But it definitely feels like they're rolling the dice with their systems of governance, and hoping the next leader is someone that actually cares about the health of society rather than a would be authoritarian ruler.
It's literally the antithesis of "cool", whatever your definition. The most square people on earth.
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing