China has CHANGED since Mao.
Mao cannot not live forever.
No Man can.

China will continue to evolve as its leader come and go where change is the only constant.

Who will be as regarded or well received as LKY after LKY in the internationl community?

You get my point.

Please stop discrediting Bryan Caplan’s reasoning on the basis that he is perceived as a PAP man. He is an academic. I deem this as a personal attack against his credentials. If this goes on, some comments may undergo moderation. Let’s have a proper debate. He has been nice enough to engage the TOC community. Let’s be nice to everyone.

Cheers
Donald
Deputy Editor
The Online Citizen

I’m starting to wonder if many of the people here actually travel around the world or just complain like “singaporeans” stereotypically do.

When general public criticise PAP to be exact you all agree and want reform.

When Objective acedamic (An establish acedemic has to be as objective as possible) tries to study and explain the sucess of the government. You all not happy cos you want to hear how he/she should criticise PAP’s bad governance.

So hard to please. you all want to hear what u all like to hear.

This place is hardly for acedemic discussion. so one sided.

By the endless support for last 50 years, can i say the people ACCEPTED ALL their policies?

What say u?

Caplan does indeed address indifference/apathy to some extent in Explanation #3 (see below)

All I’m suggesting is that he’d probably not disagree with you, and that the effects you’re talking about have been noticed!

“While the deference story does fairly well, there is also considerable evidence that resignation matters, too. Singaporeans’ unusually low professed interest in politics is telling. Only 3.2% of Singaporeans say they are “very interested,” and another 32.8% say that are “somewhat interest”; in the U.S., the corresponding numbers are 18.3% and 47.2%.[xlii] Mutalib (2004: 358) reports that three decades worth of studies of National University of Singapore undergraduates judge them to be “politically unaware, disinterested, and apathetic.” The World Values Survey consistently finds that compared to Americans, Singaporeans are extremely reluctant to engage in even low-level political participation, such as signing a petition or attending a rally.[xliii] The stereotype of the apolitical Singaporean appears to have much basis in fact.”

I agree with the other commenters above, that Caplan dismissed the authoritative argument a little too fast. Esp in terms of the media. For Median Voter model to work, it assumes that everyone knows the contesting parties’ position. Right now, the problem is people are not too sure what the opposition stand for. Part of it is due to media constraints and part of it is due to the lack of clear, coherent opposition positions. His casual reference to mass media does not give sufficient weight to the current information asymmetry.

But let’s put it this way, it is academic convention to put down the current thought before putting forth a new argument. By focusing on how poorly he put down the current thought- i.e. the dictatorship argument, misses the point that he has a new argument to make.

His new contribution to the debate is his third point. Ok, people have preferences, loyalty and apathy are not new arguments. But his point is SMALL places such as cities tend to exhibit these symptoms more than BIG places. Using US as an example, he says that there is some kind of social psychology reasoning that make people more loyal/apathatic in small elections than big elections.

In other words, the reason for the current situation is structural. AND we are stuck in it, because we can never change the size of our country. (short of war.)

Now, i personally don’t think his argument is true. If it is a small country/ city-state psychology at play, it will be consistent. However, we see a trend of votes going the other way. Is our country growing bigger? (by 1 million and a few more sq km) but i don’t think we changed our status as small/city state. SO that will be my rebuttal of his argument.

Nevertheless, despite my disagreement with his idea, i still give him points for the novelty of idea and for trying! =)

I saw SDP members at Yishun – Chong Pang hawkers center last Saturday and trying to sell their newsletter from table to table, only 3 persons ( including myself ) bought it. Many of them don’t even bother about them. Poor CSJ spoke on the loud hailer telling the peoples about rising cost of living, bad PAP policies and blah blah……., so what. Nobody seem to care. I really pity him and he looked haggard. I like to see him vote into parliament to challenge the Papies policies but will it be a dream come true. Only we the citizens of Singapore can make this happen.

I also believe the PAP’s success was due to the stunning economic growth of the past. The party which wants to defeat the PAP must emulate them in the first place. It is in everyone’s aspiration for the best and brightest to lead the nation.

As long as corruption is contained, human rights is not violated and jobs are aplenty, the PAP can be assured of success. But that success happened between 1965-2006. Singaporean’s needs now are at the Social level in Maslow’s hierachy of needs. This is where the PAP will falter based on it’s recent policies with regard to immigration, pace of life and social justice.

Mr Caplan’s Explanation#3, which he considers to be the most likely one, posits that “deference” – a belief in one party’s superior competence and/or intentions or “resignation“ – out of the thinking that other political parties have no chance of winning; are the underlying reasons behind the consistent voting patterns.

My contention is totally different. What I said was that the phenomenon has nothing whatsoever to do with the electorate’s assessment of PAP’s competence or their judgment of opposition chances. The way we vote is the result of a deeply ingrained cultural habit of political ignorance and indifference, sense of insecurity and immovable self-interest.

The inevitable conclusion is that if the PAP can continue to capitalize on these cultural weaknesses of ours, they will dominate the political scene for many more decades to come, no matter how unpopular their policies may be and no matter what the opposition does in the future.

I’ll have to agree with you there. Kaplan’s starting point is that Singapore should be examined as a democracy (and he argues it in explanation 1) but the problem is it’s rather difficult to classify Singapore’s political system.

Some call it a benevolent dictatorship. The more cynical ones see it as a constituitional monarchy ruled by the LEE dynasty. I see it as a totalitarian democracy.

At the end of the day, most readers appear to be so turned off by the PAP that they see anything defending the PAP as propaganda and rhetoric.

The paper does have its academic value and frankly, I think this article could be used in political science classes as a paper to critique.