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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