The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in ’s Developmental State Lily Zubaidah Rahim • Michael D. Barr Editors The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State Editors Lily Zubaidah Rahim Michael D. Barr Department of Government and College of Business, Government International Relations and Law University of Sydney Flinders University Sydney, NSW, Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISBN 978-981-13-1555-8 ISBN 978-981-13-1556-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1556-5

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Cover illustration: Majulah Singapura Singapore Coat of Arms Inside Old Town Hall, © dbimages / Alamy Stock Photo Cover Design by Shauli Ran

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Martin Luther King Jr. To Singaporean bravehearts, courageously striving to ‘build a democratic society based on justice and equality’ in the spirit of the National Pledge. Contents

1 Introduction: Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State 1 Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Michael D. Barr

Part I Historical Context 27

2 Singapore and the Lineages of Authoritarian Modernity in East Asia 29 Mark R. Thompson

3 Independence: The Further Stage of Colonialism in Singapore 49 Ping Tjin Thum

4 Albert Winsemius and the Transnational Origins of High Modernist Governance in Singapore 71 Kah Seng Loh

ix x CONTENTS

Part II Political and Policy Context 93

5 Social Policy Reform and Rigidity in Singapore’s Authoritarian Developmental State 95 Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Lam Keong Yeoh

6 New Politics and Old Managerialism: Welcome to the New Normal 131 Michael D. Barr

7 Intra-Party Dynamics in the People’s Action Party: Party Structure, Continuity and Hegemony 151 Walid Jumblatt Abdullah

8 The Growing Challenge of Pluralism and Political Activism: Shifts in the Hegemonic Discourse in Singapore 173 Stephan Ortmann

9 PAP Vulnerability and the Singapore Governance Model: Findings from the Asian Barometer Survey 195 Bridget Welsh and Alex H. Chang

Part III Media and Political Communication 217

10 Aligning Media Policy with Executive Dominance 219 Cherian George

11 Pragmatic Competence and Communication Governance in Singapore 233 Terence Lee CONTENTS xi

Part IV Legal and Constitutional Context 255

12 Legislating Dominance: Parliament and the Making of Singapore’s Governance Model 257 Kevin Y. L. Tan

13 Governing Authoritarian Law: Law as Security 277 Jothie Rajah

14 Conclusion: Democratising Singapore’s Developmental State 305 Dan Slater

Index 321 Editors and Contributors

Walid Jumblatt Abdullah is a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University and concurrently a postdoctoral associate at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He completed his PhD under the joint degree programme between National University of Singapore and King’s College, London. Walid’s research focuses on state-religion rela- tions, politics and Islam, and political parties and elections, and he main- tains a keen interest in political developments in Singapore and Malaysia. He has published in journals such as the International Political Science Review, Government and Opposition, Asian Survey, the Journal of Church and State, Australian Journal of International Affairs, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Indonesia and the Malay World, and the Japanese Journal of Political Science. Michael D. Barr is Associate Professor of International Relations in the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Queensland and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the University of Queensland. His first book was based on his dissertation: : The Beliefs behind the Man (2000, 2009). He wrote Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War (2002, 2004) and edited Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-­War Singapore (2008, with coeditor Carl Trocki) during his post- doctoral fellowship at QUT. He wrote Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project (2008, with Zlatko Skrbis as second author) during his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of

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Queensland. Since starting at Flinders in 2007 he has written The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence (2014) and Singapore: A Modern History (2019). He was Editor-in-Chief of Asian Studies Review from 2012 to 2017. He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2018. Alex H. Chang is an associate research scholar in the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica (IPSAS). He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Iowa and joined the faculty of IPSAS in 2007. He is primarily interested in the intersection of formal models, dem- ocratic theory, and quantitative analysis. He has authored and coau- thored several articles published in academic journals, including the Journal of Democracy, Democratization, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Contemporary China, and the Japanese Journal of Political Science, among others. Cherian George is Professor of Media Studies at the Journalism Department of Baptist University. He researches media free- dom, censorship, and hate propaganda. A native of Singapore, he has writ- ten extensively on the country’s politics and media. He has two monographs on the subject: Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore (2012) and Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006). He has also pub- lished two collections of political essays: Singapore, Incomplete: Reflections on a First World Nation’s Arrested Political Development (2017), and Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (2000). He is also the author of Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offence and its Threat to Democracy (2016). He received his PhD in Communication from Stanford University. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a degree in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. Before joining academia, he was a journalist with in Singapore, writing mainly on politics. Terence Lee is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies and a research fellow in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Australia. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, with an interest in the intersections of media, culture, and politics in Asia, especially Singapore. He is the author or editor of several books, including Singapore: Negotiating State and Society, 1965–2015 (with Jason Lim, 2016), Change EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xv in Voting: Singapore’s 2015 General Election (with Kevin YL Tan, 2016), Voting in Change: ’s 2011 General Election (with Kevin YL Tan, 2011), The Media, Cultural Control and Government in Singapore (2010), and Political Regimes and the Media in Asia (with Krishna Sen, 2008). Kah Seng Loh is a historian and an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia. His research investigates the transnational and social history of modern Singapore and Southeast Asia. He is the author or editor of seven books, including the award-nominated Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (2013), Living with Myths in Singapore (2017), and Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts (2013). He was previously a school teacher and continues to speak to students, teachers, and the public about the joys and challenges of studying the past. Stephan Ortmann is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong and a core member of the university’s Southeast Asian Research Centre. He currently teaches the politics and society of Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam, as well as social research methods. He has worked on various aspects of political and social change in East and Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and China. In 2008, he received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, on the comparative study of political change in Singapore and Hong Kong. Since then, he has worked at the Fern Universität in Hagen (Germany), Chinese University of Hong Kong, and City University of Hong Kong. His publications have appeared in many prominent aca- demic journals including Asian Survey, the Journal of Democracy, Pacific Review, State and Society, and Government and Opposition. He is also the author of Managed Crisis: Legitimacy and the National Threat in Singapore (2009), Politics and Change in Singapore and Hong Kong: Containing Contention (2010) and Environmental Governance in Vietnam: Institutional Reforms and Failures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Lily Zubaidah Rahim A Singaporean national, Lily Zubaidah Rahim is Associate Professor of Government & International Relations at the University of Sydney and a specialist in authoritarian governance, democratisation, and citizenship rights in Southeast Asia and Political Islam. Her books include The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and xvi EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (1998/2001), Singapore in the Malay World: Building and Breaching Regional Bridges (2010), Muslim Secular Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and The Politics of Islamism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). The Singapore Malay Dilemma is widely recognized as a seminal work on the Muslim com- munity in Singapore and has been translated into the by the Malaysian National Institute of Translation. Lily has published in international journal articles such as Democratization, Contemporary Politics, the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Critical Asian Studies, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. She has served as a consultant to the Asia-­Europe Foundation on Inter-faith Dialogue and was commissioned by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the United Nations Human Rights Commission to prepare reports on minorities in Southeast Asia. Lily was the President of the Malaysia and Singapore Society of Australia (MASSA) and is currently Vice-President of the Australian Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies. She has been appointed as visiting chair in Southeast Asian Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC, in 2019/2020. Jothie Rajah is a research professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, where she studies rule of law through the lens of language and power. She obtained her PhD at the Melbourne Law School, Australia, and her LLB and BA at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (2012) and a number of articles on legitimacy and authority in two main settings: Singapore and post-9/11 globalized discourses. She has taught at the Melbourne Law School, the Helsinki Law School’s Summer Institute, King’s College London, and the National University of Singapore. Dan Slater is Professor of Political Science and incoming Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan, specializes in the politics and history of democracy and dicta- torship, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His book Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. He is also a coeditor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008). His published articles can be EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xvii found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, the Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics, as well as in Asia-oriented journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, the Journal of East Asian Studies, South East Asia Research, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and TRANS. Slater is currently working with Joseph Wong on a book project that explores the phenomenon of “democracy through strength” in Northeast and Southeast Asia. He taught at the University of Chicago from 2005, when he received his PhD from Emory University, until 2017. He is also an occasional contributor to online political sites such as East Asia Forum, Inside Indonesia, The Monkey Cage, New Mandala, and Nikkei Asian Review. Kevin Y. L. Tan is a scholar of Law and History and holds degrees from the National University of Singapore and the Yale Law School. He special- izes in constitutional and administrative law and has published widely in these and other areas. He is the author and editor of over 40 books on the law, history, and politics of Singapore and is currently an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, and also at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University. Mark R. Thompson is head and professor, Department of Asian and International Studies (AIS), and Director, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC), both at the City University of Hong Kong. He taught at several German universities (in Muenster, Munich, Dresden, Passau, and Erlangen), Glasgow University in the United Kingdom, and Keio University in Japan before coming to Hong Kong. In 2008–2009, he was the Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow for Southeast Asian Studies at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore. His research has focused largely on Southeast Asian politics. He has pub- lished in a number of leading Asian studies and politics journals, edited several volumes, and is the author of The Anti-Marcos Struggle (1995), Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe (2004), and Authoritarian Modernism in East Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). xviii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Ping Tjin Thum is a research fellow in History and coordinator of Project Southeast Asia at the University of Oxford. He is also a Rhodes scholar, a Commonwealth scholar, an Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel. His work centres on decolonization in Southeast Asia and its continuing impact on Southeast Asian governance and politics. His most recent article is “The Malayan Vision of Lim Chin Siong: Unity, Non-Violence, and Popular Sovereignty”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. He is also creator of “The ” podcast (www.thehistoryofsingapore.com) and is Managing Director of New Naratif (www.newnaratif.com), a member-supported Southeast Asian platform for research, journalism, art, and community organizing. Bridget Welsh is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Outreach at John Cabot University in Rome. She specializes in Southeast Asian politics, with a particular focus on Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore. She has edited/written numerous books, including Reflections: The Mahathir Years, Legacy of Engagement in Southeast Asia, Impressions of the Years, Democracy Takeoff? The B.J. Habibie Period, Awakening: The Abdullah Badawi Years (a Malay edition Bangkit was published in 2014), and The End of UMNO? Essays on Malaysia’s Dominant Party, as well as over 50 chapters and academic articles. Her latest book is Regime Resilience in Malaysia and Singapore (edited with Greg Lopez). Her research reflects a keen interest in democracy and gov- ernance in East Asia, especially Southeast Asia. She is a member of the Asian Barometer Survey Southeast Asia team, and is currently directing the survey projects in Malaysia and Myanmar. From 2015 to 2016 she was Professor of Political Science at Ipek University in Turkey. Prior to joining Ipek, she taught at Singapore Management University, the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, and Hofstra University in New York. She received her doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University, her language training at Cornell University (FALCON), and her bachelor’s degree from Colgate University. She is also a senior research associate at the Center for East Asia Democratic Studies of National Taiwan University, a senior asso- ciate fellow at The Habibie Center, a University Fellow at Charles Darwin University, a senior advisor for Freedom House, and a member of the International Research Council of the National Endowment for Democracy. EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xix

Lam Keong Yeoh is a prominent economist and public intellectual in Singapore and is involved in both public policy and financial economics. He was formerly Chief Economist of the Government Investment Corporation (GIC) for over ten years, where he was also a Managing Director. He is currently a board member of Arohi Emerging Asia Fund, Bamboo Capital Management (a private equity impact investment firm), Nuvest Real Return Fund, and Conservation International Asia, and is on the Investment Committee of the National Council of Social Services (NCSS). In the public policy field, Lam Keong has been an advisor to or fellow at a number of research institutes like the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), the Civil Service College, and Singapore Centre for Applied Policy Economics (SCAPE) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He was also an adjunct professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and sits on the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Economics Advisory Board. He has worked on public policy with a number of key ministries, com- panies, and major consulting firms, and has authored several publications in policy analysis, political economy, and international economics in major local journals and with leading international academic publishers. His pol- icy interest areas are economic development, social policy, and environ- mental conservation. His hobbies are fishing, hiking, and nature writing. List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 One party should be dominant (%) 206 Fig. 9.2 Views of immigrant inflow 208 Fig. 9.3 Models for Singapore to follow 210

xxi List of Tables

Table 5.1 World Economic Forum, Inclusive Development Index (IDI) 2017 98 Table 5.2 Oxfam and Development Finance International, Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index (2017)—Selected high-income countries (HIC) 100 Table 5.3 Electoral trends in Singapore (1959−2015) 103 Table 5.4 Developmental states of South Korea and Taiwan: Three phases of political and social policy reform 107 Table 5.5 Number of residents (citizens and PRs) made redundant 113 Table 9.1 Trust of political institutions (positive assessments) 201 Table 9.2 Assessments of governance (positive assessments) 202 Table 9.3 Most important problems identified facing Singapore 205 Table 9.4 Critical citizens (positive assessments) 213

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