Dr Bryan Caplan, in a forthcoming piece for Ethos (journal produced by the Singapore Civil Service College; this post is based on the version posted in his blog entry) presents the two puzzles about Singapore's political economy. First, despite unpopular economic policies the PAP has still been continuously re-elected; second, despite having Westminster-style democracy Singapore remains a one-party state.

The paper then explores three families of explanations (His assessments in brackets):

1. Singapore is not really a democracy (Wrong)
2. Singapore's voters are unusually economically literate. (Dubious)
3. Singapore's voters are unusually loyal, deferential, and/or resigned. (Fits Facts Well)

However the puzzles presented have been already tackled by other scholars. To cite the influential ones, Chua Beng Huat (Communitarian Ideology and Democracy, 1995), Paul Trocki (Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control, 2006), Yao Souchou (The State and the Culture of Excess, 2007). If we use the combination of Chua, Trocki and Yao, and these are full-length books with well-researched evidence, then we would have already arrived at 1: wrong, 2: dubious, but 3 would be wrong too. They show instead that Singapore's voters are consciously and rationally making a calculated choice to prefer economic growth over political liberalization. And there is choice; voters have thus repeatedly rejected Chee's SDP which emphasizes political liberalization and privatization and preferred Chiam's SPP and Low's WP because they emphasize greater redistribution of growth.

My main critique of Caplan's paper and his interpretation of the facts ("World Values Survey" results) is that it evaluates the Singapore voter with the yardstick of the contemporary Anglo-American voter. This comparison is simply untenable since Singapore is historically, culturally, geographically, etc., different. In any case, the Whigs ruled semi-democratic Britain (no full suffrage and lots of autocracy) as a one-party state from 1721 to 1770 (with one year of Tory rule in between). The Tories who took over in 1770 to 1782 didn't do much for democracy either, and lost the American colonies as a result, and a lot more can be said about the 1800s and that century of empire, industrialization (and class conflict) and liberalization in Britain.

So really, anchoring the puzzle in so-called Westminster-style democracy is both ahistorical and ethnocentric. After all, we did not inherit a Westminster parliament, but a colonial version of it. Our founding fathers, and here I mean the whole gamut from David Marshall to Lee Kuan Yew to Lim Chin Siong, fought the British and each other for democratic, constitutional, republican government, and the outcome of this politics of decolonization is quite unique. Interestingly, the British, when they first colonized this region, thought the natives, i.e. "Malays", were "unusually loyal, deferential, and/or resigned" to their autocratic political leaders, or in their words, apathetic and fatalistic to their despotic rajas (see Frank Swettenham's "The Real Malay").

In conclusion, Caplan could have reviewed the existing literature more thoroughly as well as taken more cognizance of Singapore's cultural and social-historical context and processes.