The Costs: PAP Monopoly, Constrained Press, Bounded Democracy

Thesis

The Singaporean identity-construction and developmental transformation this series has treated as the central Asian case was accomplished at specific political costs that this article examines directly. The People’s Action Party has held all or nearly all parliamentary seats continuously from 1966 to the 1980s, has held the substantial majority through the subsequent decades, and continues as of the 2025 election to hold 87 of 97 parliamentary seats. The Singaporean press has operated under licensing and legal frameworks that have constrained coverage of the government and of political opposition, particularly through the 1970s and 1980s. The Internal Security Act permitted preventive detention without trial and was used against opposition figures — most famously Chia Thye Poh, imprisoned from 1966 to 1998 (thirty-two years) on political grounds, and Operation Coldstore in 1963 which detained over 100 leftist opposition figures. The judiciary has operated with independence in commercial and criminal matters but has generally aligned with government positions in politically-consequential cases. Public speech laws have restricted political criticism through both formal prohibitions and self-censorship, and the specific culture of Singaporean political discussion has been more constrained than in comparable democratic states.

The article’s argument is that these costs are real, are documented in the substantial literature by Singaporean scholars (Cherian George, Michael Barr, Kenneth Paul Tan, Chua Beng Huat, others) and by international critics, and are not to be minimised in an assessment of the Singaporean framework. What the article also argues, as an honest engagement with the Singapore case rather than a boosterist presentation, is that the costs have been bounded in specific ways that distinguish them from the analogous costs of failed developmental-authoritarian states. The Singaporean political framework has permitted electoral opposition (though at a distinct disadvantage), has permitted press coverage of most subjects (though with specific constraints on political criticism), has permitted independent judicial adjudication of most cases (though not of politically-consequential cases), and has permitted personal freedoms of movement, employment, association, religion, and family life without the general restrictions that characterise comprehensively authoritarian states. Singaporean citizens live comfortable, prosperous, mobile, self-directed lives in most respects; the political restrictions are real but confined to specific domains and have been sustained by continuing electoral consent from the majority.

The question this article poses — and does not fully answer, but poses honestly — is whether the Singaporean political framework’s costs are acceptable in the specific Ethiopian context and whether Ethiopia’s identity-construction requirements can be pursued under a different framework that would carry different costs but permit different political openings.

The PAP dominance

The People’s Action Party has been the dominant political force in Singapore continuously since 1959. The specific electoral record is illustrative:

• 1959. PAP won 43 of 51 seats in the pre-independence Legislative Assembly election.
• 1963. PAP won 37 of 51 seats.
• 1968. PAP won all 58 seats (the Barisan Sosialis opposition boycotted).
• 1972 through 1980. PAP won all seats in each general election (opposition parties contested some seats but did not win).
• 1981. J.B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers’ Party won an opposition seat in a by-election, ending the 1968–1981 monopoly.
• 1984 through 2020. PAP won substantial majorities (typically 80 to 95 percent of seats) with progressively larger opposition presence.
• 2020. PAP won 83 of 93 seats; the Workers’ Party won 10.
• 2025. PAP won 87 of 97 seats; the Workers’ Party won 10.

The specific mechanisms of PAP dominance have included: electoral system engineering (the GRC system that requires opposition parties to field multi-member teams; constituency boundary redrawing before elections); financial and organisational advantages of incumbency; media coverage that has favoured the government; legal restrictions on opposition organisation (which have varied across periods); the substantial governance record of continuing prosperity and stability that has produced continuing electoral support. The dominance is not attributable to any single mechanism but to the accumulated operation of the various factors across six decades.¹

The specific costs of the dominance:

Absence of alternation. Singapore has never had a change of governing party. The PAP has governed continuously since 1959. Whatever the merits of PAP governance, the absence of alternation means that the specific accountability mechanism of governing-party defeat has not operated. Policy errors have not been checked by loss of political power; leadership failures have not produced regime change; the specific discipline that democratic alternation provides has been absent.

Constrained opposition organisation. Opposition parties have operated under continuing structural disadvantage. The Workers’ Party has been the principal opposition force since the 1980s, and other parties (Singapore Democratic Party, Progress Singapore Party, and various smaller ones) have contested elections with limited success. Opposition politicians have faced defamation lawsuits from PAP figures that have produced substantial financial burdens (J.B. Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan being the most prominent cases). The organisational infrastructure available to opposition parties has been substantially smaller than that available to the PAP.

Voter concern about consequences. Singaporean voters in some constituencies have reported concerns about voting for opposition candidates on the theory that opposition-held constituencies might receive less government attention in the allocation of public services (upgrading of HDB estates, infrastructure investment, etc.). Whether such concerns are empirically justified is contested; that they operate as voter perceptions has been documented.

The press framework

Singapore’s press has operated under legal and administrative frameworks that have constrained political coverage. The specific mechanisms:

Newspaper and Printing Presses Act. The 1974 Act requires all newspapers to be published by companies whose management shares are held by government-approved individuals. The Act permits ministerial designation of foreign publications as engaging in “domestic politics” of Singapore, which can result in restrictions on distribution and advertising.

Broadcasting Act. The Act regulates broadcast media, with licensing required for all broadcasters. Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (later MediaCorp) has been the dominant broadcaster with substantial government control.

Defamation law. Singaporean defamation law permits substantial damages against defendants found to have defamed public officials. The specific cases of PAP leaders successfully suing opposition politicians and international publications have produced financial consequences that have influenced press behaviour.

Internal security legislation. The Internal Security Act permitted preventive detention on national-security grounds; the Sedition Act criminalised speech “tending to bring into hatred or contempt” the government; the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act restricted religious speech considered threatening to public order.²

The operational consequence has been that Singaporean press coverage of the government has been characterised by what analysts call “self-censorship” — journalists and editors internalising the specific boundaries of acceptable coverage without requiring explicit government intervention in most cases. The press has covered many subjects freely (business, culture, sports, international news, most policy areas) while treating politically-sensitive matters with substantial caution. Foreign correspondents and international publications have operated in Singapore but with awareness of the specific legal environment. The Reporters Without Borders press freedom index has consistently placed Singapore in the bottom third of countries assessed, with progressive if uneven improvement over the past two decades.³

The political imprisonment record

The Singaporean use of preventive detention against political opponents has been documented and is one of the specific costs of the framework.

Operation Coldstore, 1963. The pre-independence security operation, conducted by the Internal Security Council including British representatives, detained over 100 leftist opposition figures including members of the Barisan Sosialis. Some detainees were held for extended periods; the operation substantially disorganised the leftist opposition to the PAP.

Chia Thye Poh, 1966–1998. The most documented single case. Chia, a Barisan Sosialis MP, was detained under the Internal Security Act from October 1966 and held without trial for twenty-three years (until 1989), followed by nine years of restriction to Sentosa Island (until 1998). His case has been cited by human-rights organisations as one of the longest political detentions in modern history without formal charge or trial.

Operation Spectrum, 1987. Twenty-two Catholic Church workers and social activists were detained under the Internal Security Act on allegations of a “Marxist conspiracy.” Most detainees were held for periods ranging from months to over a year. The specific evidence and process has been contested; the operation is treated in Singaporean historical analysis as one of the most controversial episodes of the PAP framework.⁴

Various defamation prosecutions. The specific pattern of PAP leaders successfully suing opposition politicians for defamation, with resulting large damages, has produced a form of civil-legal consequence for political speech that has functioned analogously to criminal prosecution in constraining opposition organisation.

The specific personal-freedom framework

What the Singaporean political framework has not restricted, and what distinguishes it from comprehensively authoritarian frameworks, is the specific set of personal freedoms in daily life. Singaporean citizens have:

• Freedom of movement. Passports are issued routinely; international travel is unrestricted for non-political reasons.
• Freedom of employment. Career choice is not politically directed; labour mobility is substantial.
• Freedom of religion. All major religions operate openly; religious observance is protected by law.
• Freedom of family life. Marriage, family structure, and household arrangements are personal choices.
• Freedom of consumer choice. Personal spending, purchasing, and lifestyle are not politically directed.
• Freedom of association in non-political matters. Professional organisations, cultural associations, religious communities, sporting groups operate freely.
• Access to international media through internet. Personal internet access has been substantially unrestricted (with specific narrow exceptions).
• Access to international travel and communication. International connections have not been politically restricted for most Singaporeans.
• Access to independent commercial and criminal legal process. Non-political legal matters are adjudicated by professional courts operating with substantial independence.

The specific pattern — political freedoms constrained, personal freedoms largely intact — is what distinguishes Singapore from more comprehensively authoritarian states. The daily experience of most Singaporean citizens is comfortable, prosperous, self-directed, and unrestricted in most respects that touch daily life. The political restrictions are real but bounded.

Is this acceptable for Ethiopia?

The Ethiopian question — whether the Singaporean political framework’s costs are acceptable in the Ethiopian context — is not one this series can definitively answer. What it can do is note the specific parameters within which the question would be answered.

Ethiopia is already paying most of the Singaporean framework’s political costs. Ethiopian citizens have limited electoral alternation (three regime changes in fifty years, none through electoral process). Ethiopian press has operated under continuing restriction across three regimes. Ethiopian political prisoners have numbered in the tens of thousands across the past five decades. Ethiopian opposition organisation has been constrained by continuing legal and administrative pressures. The specific Singaporean political costs — one-party dominance, constrained press, bounded democracy, political imprisonment — are costs Ethiopia has been paying without receiving the compensating Singaporean returns.

Ethiopia is paying additional costs that Singapore has not. Ethiopian citizens have faced mass political violence (Red Terror, war deaths, current conflicts) at scales Singaporean citizens have not. Ethiopian personal freedoms have been more comprehensively restricted at various periods than Singaporean personal freedoms have been. Ethiopian rule of law in commercial and criminal matters has been substantially weaker than Singaporean rule of law. Ethiopian civil-service integrity and anti-corruption have been weaker.

The Singaporean framework requires specific institutional infrastructure that Ethiopia lacks. The PAP’s dominance has been sustained by the CPIB, the meritocratic civil service, the effective public services, the durable electoral commission, the specific institutional performance that has produced continuing citizen consent. Ethiopian institutional infrastructure has not achieved comparable performance. Adopting the political framework without the institutional infrastructure would produce the political costs without the returns.

The Ethiopian identity-construction requirements may not be reducible to the Singaporean political framework. Ethiopia has substantially larger population, more geographic diversity, and different regional security environment than Singapore. The specific political mechanisms of PAP dominance — through the GRC electoral system, the constrained press, the specific opposition disadvantages — are calibrated to Singapore’s scale. Ethiopian identity construction, at Ethiopia’s scale, would require different specific mechanisms.

The honest conclusion is that the Singaporean framework’s political costs are not acceptable in isolation from the returns; that Ethiopia’s current framework produces the costs without the returns; and that Ethiopian identity construction, if pursued, would need to construct its own political-institutional framework that produces bounded costs and substantial returns rather than either the Singaporean framework transferred wholesale or the current Ethiopian pattern continued.

What comes next

Part V takes up the multi-ethnic variants (Malaysia’s ethnic-preference framework, Indonesia’s Pancasila ideology) and the cautionary failures (Marcos’s Philippines, Nasser’s Egypt). Each of these cases attempted variants of the Asian developmental-authoritarian framework. Some produced partial identity-construction outcomes; some produced developmental transformation without identity work; some produced the political costs without the returns that this series has been examining. The multi-ethnic and cautionary cases together establish the boundaries of what the framework can and cannot produce.

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References

Footnotes

1. On PAP electoral dominance and its mechanisms, see Michael D. Barr, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence (I.B. Tauris, 2014); Kenneth Paul Tan, Governing Global-City Singapore: Legacies and Futures After Lee Kuan Yew (Routledge, 2016). ↩

2. On the press and speech framework, see Cherian George, Singapore, Incomplete: Reflections on a First World Nation’s Arrested Political Development (Woodsville News, 2017). ↩

3. On press freedom rankings, see Reporters Without Borders, World Press Freedom Index, annual editions 2002–2026. ↩

4. On Operation Spectrum, see Teo Soh Lung, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner (Ethos Books, 2010). ↩