With the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) holding 90-100 percent of elected seats in Parliament for 60 odd years, Singapore’s politics is unlike that of almost any other national electoral democracy.
It is often argued that such political dominance allows for more “long-termism” in policymaking. By this account, the government can take tough but unpopular measures—such as the Goods and Service Tax (GST) hikes, an openness to high rates of immigration and fiscal conservatism—that are supposedly in the long-term interest of the country, with less fear of electoral blowback. In contrast, intense political competition can lead to various shades of populism or “short-termism”, as rival parties struggle for votes, seeing no further than the next election.
This argument has been used in Singapore for decades to defend one-party dominance. It can be situated within a larger narrative about Singaporean exceptionalism: Singapore is “so uniquely vulnerable that it has limited policy and political options, that good governance demands a degree of political consensus that ordinary democratic arrangements cannot produce,” as Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh (Jom’s editor-in-chief) wrote. This kind of thinking has justified political “innovations”, such as the group representation constituency (GRC) system and the current approach to demarcating electoral boundaries, that may diminish the opposition’s ability to translate its share of the popular vote into elected seats.
One of the most recent and striking defences of this thesis came from Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong in Sep 2024.“…in those [politically divided] countries, governments find that doing the right thing is not politically feasible, and then political leaders of all parties default to populism or short-termism to stay in power. Thankfully, Singapore has been an exception to this rule…As growth becomes harder to come by, as revenues becomes less buoyant, and as our politics become more fiercely contested, things can go wrong for us too. If electoral margins get slimmer, the government will have less political space to do the right things. It will become harder to disregard short-term considerations in decision-making. The political dynamics will become very different. Singaporeans must understand the dangers this creates, and so must the public service.”
Ahead of a crucial general election (GE), due by November 2025, it was a clear warning by the former prime minister, and son of the PAP’s co-founder, about the “dangers” associated with political diversity. But is this the case? Does one party’s dominance necessarily lead to long-termism that’s in society’s interest? This popular narrative deserves careful scrutiny. For instance, having one dominant party could lead to an insidious brand of paranoid politics, where that party increasingly resorts to harmful populism to “buy votes” while using its political dominance to increasingly obstruct its opponents, fearing even small opposition gains.
Moreover, at a time when economic and income growth are harder to come by, that dominant party may find it harder and harder to win popular support by delivering genuine economic benefits. It may then be tempted to increasingly use that dominance to resort to unsustainable, reckless financial populism and “dirty tricks” against opponents and critics.
This is precisely what happened in Mexico in the 20th century. Notwithstanding obvious differences between our countries, it’s worth examining the effects of one-party dominance there, as well as in Japan, my other case study, before contemplating the possible trajectories for today’s PAP. While it’s obviously in the PAP’s long-term interest to maintain its dominance, we shouldn’t assume, as Lee did in his speech to the public service, that it’s necessarily in Singapore’s.
Few parties in any electoral democracy where elections are reasonably fair can match the PAP’s 65-year record of winning elections. One exception is the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico, or PRI, which dominated Mexican politics for 71 years.
Mexico is an ancient country. Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Maya and the Aztec, date back 1,300 years. In the 1520s, the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. In 1821, Mexico shrugged off the Spanish colonial yoke. But independence did not change much for ordinary Mexicans, as a land-owning elite dominated the young nation’s politics. As a reaction against that, the 1920 Mexican revolution established a modern state with democratic claims.
The PRI was formed in 1929 and quickly became the dominant political force. Under Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, the PRI government implemented ambitious economic and social reforms. Cárdenas also ensured that the PRI established a large patronage system that distributed benefits to various groups in exchange for political support. The government achieved great economic success in the mid 20th century through a policy of import substitution, the Soviet-inspired economic orthodoxy popular in the global South at the time. Mexico today is a middle-income country.
