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Ethos Issue 6, Jul 2009
Singapore’s Political Economy:
Two Paradoxes
Bryan Caplan
Understanding the paradoxes of
Singapore sheds new light on political
economy in general. While most
democracies have frequent partisan
turnover at the national level, subnational
democratic politics are often as
one-sided as in Singapore. In the broader
world though, such forms of one-party
democracy do not seem to depend on
the delivery of remarkable economic
performance. Is this because the relative
importance of loyalty, deference, and
resignation varies? Or did Singaporeans
simply have the good fortune to put
its trust in men who happened to
deserve it?
Once political economists have
a better understanding of one-party
democracy, they will be ready to take
a second look at national politics. Why
exactly is it so difficult for one party in a
democracy to stay on top at the national
level? One interesting hypothesis is
simply that people are more interested
in—and therefore less resigned about—national politics. But this raises further
questions: What determines whether
a given democratic contest will catch
voters’ interest? And under what
circumstances does greater interest lead
to worse policies?
The case of Singapore is a fascinating
challenge to time-tested models of how
democracy works. But more importantly,
the mechanisms underlying Singaporean
political economy are probably at work
in every democracy. These mechanisms
are not unique to Singapore, just
uniquely visible.
Dr Bryan Caplan is Associate Professor of
Economics at the Department of Economics,
Center for Study of Public Choice, and
Mercatus Center, George Mason University.
Dr Caplan is the author of The Myth of the
Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose
Bad Policies, published in 2007 by Princeton
University Press. It was named “the best
political book this year” by the New York
Times and a Best Book of 2007 by the Financial Times. His articles have appeared
in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and
Economics, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
| NOTES |
| 01. |
See especially Ghesquiere, H., Singapore’s Success:
Engineering Economic Growth (Singapore: Thomson
Learning, 2007). |
| 02. |
Mutalib, H., Parties and Politics: A Study of Opposition
Parties and the PAP in Singapore (Singapore: Marshall
Cavendish Academic, 2004): 5. |
| 03. |
See e.g. Cooter, R., The Strategic Constitution (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2000): 17-49. One seemingly
strong assumption—that preferences are one-dimensional
—has received a surprising degree of empirical
confirmation. See e.g. Poole, Keith, and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). |
| 04. |
These include the Workers’ Party of Singapore, the
Singapore Democratic Alliance, and the Singapore
Malays National Organisation. The only illegal party is
the Communist Party of Malaya. See generally Mutalib
(2004), and Mauzy, D., “Electoral Innovation and One-Party
Dominance in Singapore”, in Hsieh, J., and D. Newman, eds., How Asia Votes (New York: Chatham House Publishers,
2002): 246. |
| 05. |
See generally Mauzy (2002): 241-245; Mutalib (2004):
239-267. As Mauzy and Milne observed: “The Singapore
government has not committed any serious violations of
civil rights. There have been no extrajudicial killings or
political disappearances, and there are currently no political
detainees.” In: Mauzy, D., and R. Milne, Singapore Politics
Under the People’s Action Party (New York: Routledge,
2002): 128. |
| 06. |
The World Bank’s Governance Matters data set, for
example, gives Singapore stellar scores in “Rule of Law”
and “Control of Corruption”. See: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp |
| 07. |
See: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2008&country=7486 |
| 08. |
Tan, E. and Wang, Z., “The State of Democracy in
Singapore: Rethinking Some Paradoxes”. Paper presented
at conference entitled, “The Asian Barometer Conference
on The State of Democratic Governance in Asia” organised
by Asian Barometer, Taipei (Taiwan), 20-21 June 2008. |
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