Decentralised Institutions and Electoral Authoritarianism: The Case of Town Councils in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Singapore’s electoral autocracy is well known for its innovative use of political institutions such as Parliament and elections to enhance its durability, but relatively little attention has been paid to decentralised subnational institutions such as Town Councils, which require elected Members of Parliament to manage public housing estates in their constituencies. This paper focuses on Town Councils by examining the motives behind their formation and exploring how they serve as institutions to support authoritarianism. Based on analysis of a range of primary and secondary sources such as parliamentary Hansard, government documents and newspaper articles, this paper argues that the formation of Town Councils was politically motivated and specifically designed to thwart opposition growth. It also argues that Town Councils support authoritarianism in three ways. First, they create extra hurdles and disadvantages for the opposition. Second, they give the ruling party an additional election issue on which to attack the weaknesses of the opposition and allow it to shift the focus of elections in its favour. Lastly, they facilitate more effective and targeted material distribution and create more opportunities for elite co-optation. The implications of the study for Singapore politics and the role of decentralisation in electoral autocracies are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Decentralisation
• electoral authoritarian regimes
• Singapore
• Town Councils

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their insightful comments, and also thanks Stephen Ortmann for his valuable comments on the first draft of this article.

Notes

1. The risk may have diminished when the PAP decided to develop a new IT system for its TCs, with a Japanese company (NEC) winning the contract in April 2013.

2. All TCs have a legal obligation to submit their audited financial statements to the MND five months after the end of the financial year.

3. The HDB currently holds a 75 per cent stake in EM Services (HDB, 2015).

4. The information was mainly gathered from the Prime Minister’s Office website on National Day Award recipients (http://www.pmo.gov.sg/national-day-awards) and the People’s Action Party’s website (https://www.pap.org.sg/).