21 July, 2020

Quora Answer: Why Does Singapore Even Pretend to Have a Democracy?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why does Singapore even pretend to have a democracy?

The definition of a democracy is a system of governance where citizens that comprise the electorate vote on issues of governance, or they vote for their political leaders.  Singapore is a representative democracy, which means that the citizens vote for their parliamentary representatives, and they form the government.  Singapore has a first past the post system, as opposed to a representative system according to political parties.  As such, the winners of each contest sit in parliament.

What you are doing is conflating a democracy for liberalism.  Singapore is socialist, meaning that the needs of society are held to be more important than the particular liberties of the individual.  As such, agitating for “freedom” is entirely subjective.  For example, an individual may demand the freedom of free expression, whereas the state determines that the freedom of racial and religious minorities from hate speech has a higher value.  It is a matter of values and perception.  There is no pretense here, only a matter of interpretation and definition.



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