Migration status and attitude towards authoritarian rule: the case of Singapore’s naturalized citizens

ABSTRACT

Immigration has become a controversial issue in Singapore, an enduring Southeast Asian electoral autocracy. One of the controversies concerns how immigrants would influence Singapore’s domestic politics. Drawing on two surveys, this study examines immigrants’ views on authoritarian rule, both their attitudes towards Singapore’s incumbent regime and their perceptions of democracy and authoritarianism. The results present a mixed picture. On the one hand, immigrants who were naturalized tend to favour the incumbent more than the native-born. They tend to have better evaluations of state institutions and government performance than the native-born. Partial evidence also exists that naturalized citizens are more likely to vote for the incumbent than the native-born. On the other hand, the author found no strong evidence that naturalized citizens are less supportive of democracy or more pro-authoritarian than the native-born. Political and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral authoritarianism
• democracy
• immigrant
• incumbent support
• Singapore

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. However, any error and shortcoming are the author’s. He also wishes to thank Stephen Ortmann and Nick H.K. Or for their valuable comments and technical advice on the earlier drafts of this article. An earlier version of this article was presented as a poster at the 2017 SEAREG-East Meeting, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, December 12-14, 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Singaporean government is reluctant to disclose a detailed breakdown of naturalized citizens’ countries of origin, citing the data’s sensitivity (Parliament of Singapore 2016a).

2. Singapore has so far participated in two waves of WVS, Wave 4 (2002) and Wave 6 (2012). Only Wave 6 is used in this study because it is the only wave which asked whether the respondents were immigrants. Another recent publicly available survey which contains respondents’ migration status is the 2015 IPS post-election survey (Koh 2015). I chose not to use this survey because many of its items overlap with the PGS and it does not include respondents’ voting choices.

3. Cases with missing values were deleted list-wise.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hoi-Yu Ng

Hoi-Yu Ng is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, Education University of Hong Kong.