Bread-and-Butter Politics: Arrested Liberalization and Hegemonic Materialism in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Singapore has displayed a continued ability to confound the assumed symbiotic relationships between democratization, economic growth, and liberalism. This paper historicizes the development, use, and understanding of a popular idiom frequently employed in Singaporean electoral discourse – “bread-and-butter” – to explore the relationship between hegemonic discourses, social attitudes, and political contestation in Singapore. Doing so reveals a complex pattern of the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) ideological-discursive legwork: bread-and-butter issues are discursively constituted around a set of core economic issues and demarcated as the key political concerns of voters, while calls for more liberal or progressive changes in society are bracketed within the sphere of postmaterialist values. By seeking to maintain the hegemonic notion of the party as the guarantor of basic material goods, PAP sets the terms of competition in electoral politics to issues that are its perceived strengths. The party’s continued ability to provide economic goods contributes to its political success, stalling the growth of liberalization and a more competitive political landscape in Singapore. Bread-and-butter discourse therefore reflects and reproduces the preeminence of materialism in Singapore’s politics.

KEYWORDS:

• democratization
• ideological hegemony
• postmaterialist values
• state-society relations
• Singapore

Introduction

Singapore’s government continues to complicate the assumed symbiotic relationship between democratization, economic growth, and liberalism. While popular versions of modernization theory claim a linear relationship between economic growth and democratization through the gradual development of postmaterialist values within civil society,¹ Singapore’s spectacular rate of economic growth since independence has not led to the development of liberal democracy as modernization theory had hypothesized.² Instead, Singapore remains a de facto one-party state in which the People’s Action Party (PAP) has maintained a supermajority in parliament since 1959. The PAP dominates Singaporean social and political life to the point where “analyses of the Singaporean state are de facto analyses of the PAP.”³

The stability of the PAP has led to considerable scholarship, frequently contextualized within studies of authoritarian regimes.⁴ Despite being fully invested in the liberal international order, the PAP is not and does not claim to be a liberal political party,⁵ and has instead, according to Chua Beng Huat, “disavowed liberalism.”⁶ Issues such as human rights and government accountability feature more prominently in Singaporean opposition politics and are generally associated with poorer electoral outcomes.⁷ Scholars have used a range of methods to explain these central issues. An application of intellectual history supported by a social and political theoretical basis can build off existing Gramscian⁸ and Foucauldian⁹ approaches to the study of Singaporean politics and society. This approach emphasizes the generative nature of bringing sub-disciplines like intellectual history and socio-political theory more strongly to the study of democratization, whether in Singapore or in general, exhibiting how discursive inscriptions bear on the stability of political parties such as the PAP. This is performed by political agents, offering a clear means to recover the political agency often obscured by structuralist approaches.

We emphasize the term “bread-and-butter” to explore the relationship between hegemonic discourses, social attitudes, and political hegemony in Singapore.¹⁰ This term has special resonance in Singapore, marked not only by its frequent usage, but also its currency within the PAP’s political discourse. Our account details the genealogy of the term in modern Singapore, from independence in 1965 to 2020. This term encompasses material concerns, especially housing, wages, and local infrastructure. In many instances, the term has been counter-posed explicitly against demands for liberal or progressive changes, with the implication that such demands do not constitute the core interests of everyday Singaporean voters. While postmaterialist values have emerged as the central plank associated with democratization, material issues have become ossified as the primary legitimate object of electoral politics, and issues or items that lie outside of the scope of bread-and-butter therefore lie outside the scope of legitimate contestation within electoral politics. The PAP, in other words, has sought to maintain the perception of itself as the guarantor and provider of basic material goods. In order to capitalize on this claim and translate it into political legitimacy, the party has forestalled demands for postmaterialist values.

This exercise also allows us to extend and update the literature on state-society relations in Singapore by highlighting a process within state-society relations where the state reproduces its dominance over and autonomy from civil society.¹¹ Where demands from civil society emerge on postmaterialist issues, bread-and-butter discourse insulates the electoral sphere – that is, political contestation over the state – from political demands emanating from civil society. In other words, issues concerned with postmaterialist values are coded as the prerogative of civil society, while electoral politics, treated as autonomous and separate from civil society, are coded as concerned with materialist issues. This dilutes the salience of postmaterialist claims within electoral politics, shielding the electoral sphere from broader pressures emanating in society. This has the effect of setting the terms on which electoral politics are contested and confining electoral politics to issues that are of the PAP’s perceived strength.

In the following section, we outline our theoretical lens, which draws on aspects of Foucauldian and Gramscian approaches. Section three describes the development of bread-and-butter political discourse in Singapore since 1968 and how it has stunted the development of postmaterialist discourses in Singapore. We conclude by noting the implications of our study, as well as areas of further study.

Theoretical overview

Foucault and Fraser: discourses of needs

Some of Michel Foucault’s most penetrating and enduring insights have been within the field of intellectual history. Foucault claimed that we should avoid studying the ideas of specific actors or subjects, and instead focus on the context which enables or constrains certain forms of thought.¹² These actors are situated within an episteme, which sets the horizons for what ideas are contemplatable or not at a given time, and thereby legitimate or disable certain courses of action. While Foucault looked beyond language to a broader range of social practices, he afforded language a privileged space, where the episteme takes the form of discourse.¹³ Studying these discourses can reveal the shifting signification of terms and provide insights for the wider social and political landscape on which discourse is constructed. Crucially, Foucault emphasized that these discourses do not develop in a determined way but instead result from the contingencies of the exercise of power, where social groups within a society impose these limits and horizons of thought. This emphasizes the role of diachronic change over time within these discourses.¹⁴

These Foucauldian insights have provided the bedrock for many iterations of discourse analysis.¹⁵ Most germane for our purposes is Nancy Fraser’s observation that scholarly focus has primarily been restricted to the provision of predefined needs that states have to provide their citizens if they are to retain their legitimacy. According to Fraser, this neglects “who interprets the needs in question and from what perspective and in the light of what interests” which “overlook[s] the fact that who gets to establish authoritative, thick definitions of people’s needs is itself a political stake.”¹⁶ Fraser, drawing on Foucault, instead shifts the angle of approach:

… the focus of inquiry is not needs but rather discourses about needs. The point is to shift our angle of vision on the politics of needs. Usually, the politics of needs is understood to concern the distribution of satisfactions. In [her] approach, by contrast, the focus is the politics of need interpretation.”¹⁷

Following Foucault, she stresses that the dominance of a particular interpretation is contingent on a social group within the society in question managing to instill their interpretation of needs through discursive intervention. This politicization of needs reveals political agency in the discursive realm, where different agents can intervene in public discourse to lay claim to various interpretations or forms of provisions of needs in order to challenge prevailing common-sense understandings.

In the context of Singapore, “bread-and-butter” as a discursive signifier allows us to understand a deeper contestation over social values and politics. Bread-and-butter functions as a “nodal point” – that is, “privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain”¹⁸ – of our investigation of political discourse in Singapore, not merely because the idiom is frequently used in Singaporean political discourse, but also because its reference to basic material needs neatly dovetails with the conventional idea of needs. Instead of taking the term to embody a fixed, preordained meaning, we critically historicize the diachronic development of its connotations and associations over time, identifying the moments of contestation between various agents.¹⁹

To theorize bread-and-butter, we turn to the work of Ronald Inglehart, most known for his hypothesized link between economic development and the transition from materialist to postmaterialist values.²⁰ In line with modernization theory, Inglehart posits that economic development in a society leads to a transition from materialist values, emphasizing the importance of economic well-being and survival, to postmaterialist values, which involve the desire for a greater quality of life, self-expression, and individual autonomy. These changing preferences, in turn, shape the political and social fabric of a society. In particular, as an economy grows more affluent, Inglehart argues that basic imperatives of economic survival diminish in salience, and individuals begin to value individual choice and self-expression, which eventually will lead to greater clamoring for liberal democracy.

We find in our historical investigation that the discursive use of bread-and-butter in Singapore bears a striking resemblance to Inglehart’s schema, where bread-and-butter connotes a continued commitment to a perceived sense of the basic and most fundamental economic needs facing ordinary people. Conversely, issues typically perceived as not bread-and-butter have tended to be framed as more aspirational, liberal, or progressive, beyond the basic needs of Singaporeans, and much more akin to Inglehart’s postmaterialist values. Yet, while the use of bread-and-butter follows the basic categories of Inglehart’s materialist and postmaterialist values, the continued salience of the ideological hegemony of economic security and survival, as embodied in the state’s discursive use of bread-and-butter, suggests that Inglehart’s hypothesized link between economic development and postmaterialism is more complicated in Singapore’s case. This ideological hegemony can be explained by turning to the Singapore scholar Chua Beng Huat and his Gramscian reading of Singaporean politics.

Gramsci and Chua: hegemony in Singapore

While the scholarship on Singapore politics has tended to emphasize the role of coercion and authoritarianism to understand the political dominance of the PAP, a different strand pioneered by Chua’s use of Gramsci’s insights on hegemony suggests that the political durability of PAP can be better explained by its enduring popularity.²¹ Briefly, for Gramsci, the state represents the interests of the ruling classes not only through the exercise of force, but also through the cultivation of consent. Hegemony is achieved to the extent that force no longer constitutes the primary form of exercising rule and is employed merely in “moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.”²²

This enduring popularity is rooted in both material and ideological elements. The continued centrality of materialism in Singapore politics is best exemplified by the ways in which public housing provision remains the materialist issue par excellence. One of the primary ways in which the PAP has reproduced its hegemony has been its success in meeting basic housing needs, with approximately eighty percent of the population housed in publicly-built housing. This has evolved into a more sophisticated dynamic between the state and citizens. The PAP ties its continued political support to the expectation that it will provide prospective homeowners with affordable housing subsidized by the state, and existing homeowners expect rising property prices to lead to capital gains out of their housing assets. The extraordinary role that the state plays in subsidizing, managing, and regulating the housing market in Singapore thus constitutes the primary form of welfare that the state provides to its population, and makes it a “property-owning democracy.”²³ As rising property prices are driven by the fundamentals of economic growth, homeowning Singaporeans have a personal stake in continued national economic development. The continued dominance of the PAP as the fulcrum of political stability is then sought as the alleged precondition of this economic development. The prevalence of housing as a core consideration of voters provides an underlying structural explanation for why Singapore does not linearly demonstrate a shift in political preferences towards postmaterialist values, in spite of its exemplary track record of economic development and rising affluence. Not only does this make Singapore an exception to the broader claims of modernization theory, it also reflects a longstanding ideological stance by the ruling PAP to disavow liberalism.

In addition to the centrality of housing, Chua highlights Gramsci’s insight that while hegemony often entails repressive measures to “dominate antagonistic groups, which it tends to liquidate, or to subjugate even by means of force,” it crucially also requires the generation of consent among the governed through consistent ideological legwork, thereby leaving the reproduction of hegemony an open, contingent process.²⁴ The establishment and reproduction of hegemony entails both material and ideological elements, in the forms of dispensation of economic benefits to subordinate groups as well as propagation of ideological hegemony, where the “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding the world that has become common.”²⁵

This latter point, of hegemony as a form of common sense, is significant for the two key ideological discourses Chua outlines: survival and pragmatism.²⁶ Chua accentuates the prevalent public discourse of how the Singapore state’s primary overarching objective was to survive, and that to do so it could not be ideological, and instead had to be pragmatic. As Chua observes, these ideological tenets were “at once historical, material, and conceptual” as they took the historical and material conditions Singapore faced at independence in 1965.²⁷ At that time Singapore was a relatively un-industrialized entrepôt with high formal unemployment, which allowed for the rationalization of rapid economic growth and industrialization as the “only strategy for Singapore's survival as a nation.”²⁸ As a result, the underdevelopment faced by Singapore political leaders at independence was transformed into an overriding goal to ensure continuous economic growth and increased material standards for the majority of the population. Despite the PAP’s normal refrain that its pragmatism transcends ideology, and a political culture that treats ideology as pernicious to the conduct of governance, pragmatism itself embodies ideological content by privileging economic concerns.²⁹

This drive towards economic pragmatism at the level of Gramscian common sense is embodied in the state’s use of the term “bread-and-butter.” In the Singapore context, Fraser’s politics of needs culminates in Chua’s notion of economic pragmatism as ideological hegemony, as the notion of needs, found in the idiom “bread-and-butter,” signifies basic material needs like the provision of housing and jobs.³⁰

We do not claim that discourse encompasses the totality of social relations, or that it should be a reason to deemphasize structural, material frames. A discursive toolkit always leaves analysis one degree removed and is not a direct description of material realities. What we attempt in what follows is to map out the terrain on which these social changes are understood by explaining the discursive development of postmaterialism through the use of an associated term as a thread. This mapping sheds light on the relationship between material practices and discursive representations, where the interplay of linguistic utterances reveals or shapes aspects of the shared socio-political realities within Singapore. This reveals these socio-political realities by taking the displayed moments of congruence, consistency, or rupture as symbolic of a wider shared social imagination. Discourse can shape these realities by imposing standards of legitimacy or enclosing the ambit of acceptable or intelligible dialogue.³¹

Bread-and-Butter in Singapore’s political and electoral discourse

Beginnings (1968–1980)

The founding moment of bread-and-butter discourse in post-independence Singapore is 1968. The key actor was S. Rajaratnam, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1965 to 1980 and is widely acknowledged as the chief ideologue of the PAP’s first generation of leaders.³² Faced with the developmental needs of a young nation-state, the PAP’s iteration of socialism³³ featured equality of opportunity that was coupled with an ideology of survival that saw rapid economic growth as a key step to securing the future of the nation.³⁴ Singapore at that stage was on a path reminiscent of one outlined by Inglehart, where materialist concerns dominate the national agenda over postmaterialist concerns.

Yet, Rajaratnam framed the general parameters for understanding bread-and-butter in ways that did not neatly follow a materialist-postmaterialist trajectory. He encouraged Singaporeans to look beyond such issues towards “effective encouragement and demand for the beautiful things” like patronage of the arts.³⁵ Rajaratnam worried that a thriving national culture and sense of community would not be able to flourish if Singaporeans only concerned themselves with material issues. He called for Singaporeans to look beyond “the bread and butter aspects of existence” to form a “harmonious and rational preoccupation with both art and bread-and-butter problems,” and quipped that a “people who concern themselves wholly with bread-and-butter problems would soon reduce themselves to a pack of ruthless animals devoid of all human qualities who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”³⁶ In 1970, Rajaratnam heralded the genesis of a postmaterialist Singapore, opining that Singapore had already settled “bread and butter problems.”³⁷

While Rajaratnam’s attempt’s to shape an awareness of Singaporean identity may be partially explained by his past experience as Singapore’s first Minister of Culture (from 1959 to 1965), this must be seen in a broader context of the PAP’s post-independence nation-building project. Barely five years after independence, Rajaratnam declared that Singaporeans had secured material comfort and were ready to progress to the next stage. Rajaratnam’s vision for Singapore reflected modernization theory’s assumption that as a society develops economically, it will move from material to postmaterialist concerns.

However, Rajaratnam’s postmaterialism also crucially diverged from the liberal teleology of modernization theory, which assumes that people will increasingly desire autonomy and self-expression.³⁸ In Rajaratnam’s rendering, economic development does not necessarily lead to a desire for liberal democracy. Instead, he argued that cultural values are tied to a broader nation-building project built upon Singapore’s entrenched and politically dominant one-party state. His vision was not explicitly political and did not directly delegitimize opposition parties.

Rajaratnam’s aspiration for a postmaterialist Singapore rooted in a PAP-led nation-building vision would continue to be articulated even as bread-and-butter discourse became increasingly entrenched in Singapore. While Inglehart’s version of postmaterialist values had hypothesized that the political openness arising from economic development will materialize in a competitive, multi-party, liberal democracy, Rajaratnam’s twist envisioned that rising postmaterialism could be contained within the nation-building imperatives of PAP’s single-party rule in Singapore.

A key shift occurred around 1972, when bread-and-butter rhetoric entered into political discourse. Pang Cheng Lien, a local journalist and future diplomat, observed that Singapore had entered a new phase which she called the “politics of affluence,” a result of political stability and sustained economic growth.³⁹ This, she argued, had bred a “disinterest in politics,” as Singaporeans were “more concerned with bread and butter issues,” and being “happy if the party in power succeeds in solving these.”⁴⁰ Having obtained financial and economic security, Singaporeans faced the problem of the corrupting influence of what she called “excessive” wealth, which unless checked would eventually lead to Singapore’s ruin.⁴¹ According to Pang, this would make things more difficult for opposition parties, as they would be unable or unwilling to resolve bread-and-butter issues as efficiently as the ruling party. Pang anticipated how the task of raising the material standards of Singaporeans would become one of the fundamental priorities that citizens expected from the state. Hers is an explicit articulation of the idea that the PAP represents the safe bet to provide citizens with material security given its incumbent political status, superior political resources, and electoral track record, particularly vis-à-vis opposition parties. This foreshadowed the shift from bread-and-butter as an early stage in the nation-building project to the politicization of bread-and-butter issues, which would see political parties start to base their legitimacy on their claim to meet these needs. Pang used Rajaratnam’s insights to bring a twist to modernization theory. Rather than bring about an inevitable rise of postmaterialist values or establish a competitive, multi-party liberal democracy, a focus on bread-and-butter issues in Singapore would shore up the legitimacy of the PAP and maintain the one-party system while entrenching the salience of material issues.

The materialist connotations of bread-and-butter were counterposed with ideological issues, leaving only those issues which were seen as non-ideological and pragmatic justifiable within Singaporean politics.⁴² Speaking before the 1972 election, PAP Member of Parliament Augustine Tan claimed that the “ideological rhetoric” of the opposition Workers’ Party (WP) could “not produce bread and butter or jobs.”⁴³ Ahead of the 1976 election, National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) secretary-general and then-PAP loyalist Devan Nair accused opposition parties, especially WP leader Joshua Jeyaratnam, of not paying attention to “bedrock bread and butter issues” and being “economic ignoramuses” who would shake international confidence in Singapore, eventually leading to huge job losses.⁴⁴ The following year, PAP parliamentary candidate Bernard Chen claimed that Jeyaratnam’s human rights rhetoric missed what Singaporeans truly desired: “the rights to a better life – the right to work, to stay in decent houses, the right to education, medical facilities, and law and order.” These, for Chen, were “the real bread and butter issues,” which he juxtaposed with the “empty words uttered by the Opposition.”⁴⁵ Chen argued that the PAP was responsible for raising the standard of living in Singapore, for example by boosting home ownership rates.

The attacks on opposition parties continued in the 1979 by-election, when the PAP won all seven of the seats contested. Nair claimed that issues raised by the opposition were irrelevant when placed alongside more important “bread and butter issues.”⁴⁶ Two days before the 1979 by-election, the PAP’s election strategy was described in an article in the Singaporean newspaper The New Nation as centering on “bread and butter offerings”: “staples” which the “common man” will find “irresistible.”⁴⁷ These included upgrading public housing flats and building surrounding facilities, compared with the opposition’s vague campaign promises. A report in The Business Times after the election picked up on this theme, characterizing the PAP’s case as “based simply on the government’s ability to provide the bread and butter that made life that much better.”⁴⁸ The post-election analysis of the PAP’s convincing victory did not miss the significance of its strategy of focusing on bread-and-butter. Echoing Trade Minister Goh Chok Tong, who derided the opposition’s “soft-headed infantile liberalism” as a political dead-end, Straits Times reporter Kian Chee Goh noted that so “long as the incumbents can continue solving bread and butter problems, improving the quality of life and generally providing Singaporeans with more of the expanding cake equitably, honestly and efficiently, theoretically the PAP could hold power indefinitely.”⁴⁹ The 1980 election was also a landslide victory for the PAP, as it won 75.6 percent of the popular vote and all seventy-five parliamentary seats.

Whereas in 1970 Rajaratnam had been of the view that Singapore had settled bread-and-butter issues, and therefore would eventually progress towards a postmaterialist horizon, by 1980 Singapore’s progress towards this seemed firmly stalled. Electoral imperatives were the main driver of this, as the continued ability of the PAP government to raise material standards provided ample political currency to bread-and-butter discourse. Their success was used by PAP leaders to delegitimize opposition figures, who they portrayed as economically ignorant, excessively focused on liberal ideals, and a threat to the continued economic prosperity of the country. In the process, bread-and-butter became discursively entrenched as an object of political responsibility, along with all the associated materialist aspects that it signified.

Contestation and hegemony (1981-2020)

While the process was hardly linear, the PAP’s successful strategy of appealing to voters by emphasizing bread-and-butter issues gradually became adopted by key opposition members. Beginning in 1980, more political parties campaigned on their ability to meet citizens’ bread-and-butter needs. However, this period coincided with the anticipation that an increasingly affluent Singapore population would soon adopt more postmaterialist values, desiring in particular a greater level of participation and openness in the political process, as hypothesized by Inglehart and Rajaratnam. In other words, a dialectical conundrum emerged for the ruling party, as the more it was seen to have successfully met bread-and-butter needs, the more that citizens could value postmaterialist issues. The future that Rajaratnam prefigured in 1972 appeared to be forthcoming in the 1980s, yet political actors still had to grapple with the increasingly entrenched and politically lucrative discourse of bread-and-butter issues.

Ahead of the 1981 by-election, a National Day editorial in The Straits Times predicted that rapid economic development meant Singaporeans would “shift their attention from basic ‘bread and butter issues’ [because these have been solved] to more qualitative issues like improving the quality of life, increasing leisure time, and increasing one’s control over one’s life.”⁵⁰ The result was that Singaporeans began to demand more participation in policymaking. Similarly, in 1983, Minister of State Wong Kwei Cheong claimed that Singaporean workers had “gone beyond the bread and butter issues of everyday living” and were instead searching for more than wages.⁵¹

In both the 1981 by-election and 1984 general election, opposition figures contested the PAP’s interpretation of bread-and-butter issues. Singapore Democratic Party leader Chiam See Tong, after admitting that he had previously not focused enough on “bread and butter” issues,⁵² argued that the “solution to Singapore’s bread and butter issues” was through an opposition presence in parliament.⁵³ Barisan Sosialis leader Lee Siew Choh spoke of “bread and butter issues, for example education and how children have been discriminated against … we want to show the people that the PAP caters mainly for the rich and neglects the poor.”⁵⁴ This crucially shows the contestability of bread-and-butter, where what is conceived as a basic need is not necessarily interpreted as material development, but as resolving inequality or ensuring a stronger opposition presence.

In the runup to the 1984 general election, the PAP used its tried and tested strategy of campaigning on bread-and-butter issues, which its surveys had indicated were the primary concerns of voters. PAP candidate Chng Hee Kok confidently asserted that there were “no bread and butter issues that could adversely affect the PAP now.”⁵⁵ Yet, although the PAP won a dominant victory with 64.8 percent of the popular vote, this was a 12.8 percent drop in support compared to the 1980 election and was interpreted by PAP leaders as a political shock. The results threw up a need for the PAP to try to rationalize or justify its poor electoral performance for the first time since independence. This rationalization of poor electoral results would become a key theme in the future years, with bread-and-butter an explicit central focus of the PAP’s diagnosis of its electoral fortunes.⁵⁶

Two elections later, the 1991 general election saw the PAP’s share of the popular vote decline to sixty-one percent, its lowest since independence, and the opposition gained a further three seats. While still an overwhelming victory, the results were seen as a major setback. In the aftermath of this election, the PAP moved quickly to rebut explanations that rising postmaterialist values had taken precedence among voters and determined the swing in results. PAP officials had billed this election as a referendum on new Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s consultative style, and the immediate reaction was to interpret the results as a rebuke of this. Yet the results also reflected voter grievances, particularly around rising class disparities.⁵⁷ Bread-and-butter discourse emerged prominently during this election post-mortem, as analysts and PAP leaders attempted to explain the negative results. At stake was the question of whether the shift away from the PAP had been driven by bread-and-butter issues (such as economic grievances) or by rising postmaterialist values among an increasingly educated electorate.⁵⁸ These stakes were laid out by journalist Leslie Fong, who posed the question of whether “unhappiness over bread and butter issues really [was] the main reason why many Singaporeans voted against” the PAP, and suggested that “the weightage that the ruling party gives to what it thinks are the real reasons will help determine its response, which, in turn, will have an impact on politics in Singapore.”⁵⁹

Prominent commentators soon began questioning the perception that the PAP was the best guarantor of bread-and-butter for Singapore’s citizens. A leading journalist for The Straits Times, Han Fook Kwang, noted that “there were now greater class feelings among Singaporeans, with more of them being divided along income lines.”⁶⁰ Han went on to observe that it is “part of post-election conventional wisdom that many lower and middle income Singaporeans in Housing Board estates were unhappy over bread and butter issues, and thus voted against” the PAP.⁶¹ Another journalist, Bertha Henson, suggested that the PAP had neglected the “bread and butter” concerns of working-class Singaporeans.⁶²

The PAP moved quickly to counter this explanation of the election results. Minister of National Development S. Dhanabalan protested that it “is absolutely wrong for anybody to conclude that we have ignored bread-and-butter issues … But I think we have not persuaded people to see that in fact we have addressed bread-and-butter issues.”⁶³ Prime Minister Goh drew a distinction between Chinese working-class voters and Chinese intellectuals, asserting that the former were primarily concerned with bread-and-butter issues.⁶⁴ Echoing Dhanabalan’s argument, he claimed that the party had not adequately reached out to them. He also claimed that the decline in support for PAP was not due to bread-and-butter issues but to what he called “bacon-or-egg” issues, echoing Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s argument that it was not economic factors that caused the downswing in voter support for PAP but cultural issues arising from higher standards of living.⁶⁵

In the 2000s, bread and butter issues continued to feature prominently. The 2006 general election foregrounded the issue of youth voters, identifying locating a social demographic amongst whom rising postmaterialist values could be located.⁶⁶ Election fever built up from March that year, two months before the election. During this time Ivan Png, a parliamentary candidate, claimed that the issues he would focus on would be “longer-term, more latent issues” which “middle and upper-middle income groups” would be concerned with, instead of “bread and butter” issues that were ostensibly the concern of the working-class groups.⁶⁷ This, as in 1991, associated bread-and-butter with class status and inequality. On the same day, The Straits Times published two articles on youth voters using survey data to establish that “while conventional wisdom has it that this well-travelled lot exposed to liberal cultures is likely to be concerned with issues like political freedom,” jobs and living costs were their main concern. That is to say, “bread and butter issues are still uppermost in their minds.”⁶⁸ A “chain of equivalence”⁶⁹ was thereby drawn between postmaterialist values, liberal attitudes, the middle to upper-middle classes, and finally Singapore’s youth.

In an article in the Today newspaper entitled, “Issues That Don’t Matter … And Issues That Do,” 158 Singaporeans were polled on the most important considerations they had when voting in the upcoming election.⁷⁰ The poll found that issues such as casinos, a high-profile corruption scandal involving the National Kidney Foundation, high ministerial salaries, and foreign talent recruitment were less important than the cost of living, jobs, economic growth, racial harmony, and terrorism.⁷¹ In a letter to the editor in response, a citizen lamented that Singaporeans should realize that parliamentary politics was the foundation from which their “daily life and goodies” were based, and that more importance should be given to these issues.⁷²

In May 2006, the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) published the results of a survey of over one thousand voters and concluded that “voters considered an efficient and fair government more important than bread-and-butter issues.”⁷³ In follow up articles published in The Straits Times in June, IPS researchers consistently contrasted bread-and-butter issues with political freedoms.⁷⁴ The survey results were challenged by PAP officials. Minister for National Development Mah Bow Tan retorted that the results did not cohere with his on-the-ground experiences.⁷⁵ The survey results also triggered speculation that the results had been rigged to debunk myths about Singaporean voters, pushing Gillian Koh, one of the lead researchers in the survey, to clarify that the results were “a testament to the PAP’s ability to settle these bread-and-butter issues on the ground,” and suggested that the party’s recent policies targeting healthcare and poorer workers meant that bread-and-butter issues were already taken care of, enabling voters to switch to other concerns like political freedoms.⁷⁶ On the same day of Koh’s response, the authors of a commentary published in Today agreed that even though bread and butter issues did not rank at the top of voter concerns, they were nevertheless regarded as important.⁷⁷ The commentary reiterated that PAP was the party that best delivered bread-and-butter, and that “nobody can argue against having an efficient government – which is almost synonymous with the People’s Action Party.” The authors concluded by echoing Koh’s statements that bread and butter issues were “not something that bugs [voters] daily or which they even think to complain about.”⁷⁸

This brings us to 2011, widely seen as a watershed year in Singapore's electoral history.⁷⁹ At the 2011 general election, the PAP won 60.1 percent of the vote, its lowest share since independence. It lost a group representation constituency (GRC) for the first time, and a total of nine seats to the opposition.⁸⁰ Shortly thereafter, the 2011 presidential election was a major scare for the PAP. Under Singapore law, presidential candidates must be non-partisan, although political parties have preferred candidates. PAP’s preferred candidate, Tony Tan, won 35.2 percent of the popular vote, a fraction of a percent over second-placed Tan Cheng Bock, a former PAP parliamentarian who had founded the Progress Singapore Party. Taken together, the general and presidential elections of 2011 signaled an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction with PAP governance. While declines in support were not new in Singapore's electoral history, notable in 2011 were a series of high-profile policy failings, seen most prominently in high prices and long wait times for housing, over-crowded public transportation, and public anger over high levels of immigration.⁸¹ This context suggests that 2011 was a moment when the PAP might lose its grasp over bread-and-butter discourse, allowing opposition parties to capitalize.

Interestingly, 2011 also saw attempts to reframe or complicate the meanings of bread-and-butter. A week before votes were cast, The Straits Times published an article in which independent analysts noted that a downturn in support for the PAP could prompt a policy shift in areas such as immigration and housing. While policy failings were leading to dissatisfaction over “rising costs of living, unaffordable property, and unhappiness over the influx of foreign workers,” the swing in votes away from the PAP, particularly among young voters, was explained as a shift away from bread-and-butter issues.⁸² One analyst suggested that “political debate [in the electoral campaign] could likely be focused on aspirational rather than bread and butter issues.”⁸³ Even as public dissatisfaction was building up over issues conventionally seen as the domain of bread-and-butter, public commentators did not attribute this to a decline in the PAP’s ability to provide bread-and-butter, instead explaining this as a case of rising postmaterialism. Bread-and-butter could no longer be used to refer to economic matters. Another article in The Straits Times pointed to the high levels of GDP growth and Singapore's quick recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis, but contrasted this with the likely issues that would dominate the election, including “bread and butter issues such as rising home prices, cost of living, immigration policy and the influx of foreigners.”⁸⁴ Bread-and-butter issues were recast by PAP officials as ground-level rather than national issues. In a campaign speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, “we need to look over the horizon, anticipate and prepare for problems and build for the future, but we must also be in touch with people's sentiments and worries and address their day-to-day bread and butter concerns.”⁸⁵

In a letter published in The Straits Times before the election, Seng Chye Chua argued that ground level issues were as important as national level issues.⁸⁶ These national issues included the presence of opposition members like Chiam See Tong in parliament, as well as the prospect of voters punishing then-Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng over his handling of the high-profile escape of noted terrorist Mas Selamat. Chia suggested that “bread and butter issues in our own backyard” such as the maintenance and upkeep of housing estates, which would boost the values of residents’ homes, were more important to voters.⁸⁷ The material-economic interests implied by bread-and-butter points to two opposing sets of interests. On the one hand, rising property prices were seen as a bread-and-butter issue that directly impacted housing affordability. On the other hand, municipal issues were also seen as bread-and-butter issues to the extent that they could boost both the living conditions and property values of existing homeowners.

Policy missteps and the prospect of declining electoral support were reflected in the evolving discursive use of bread-and-butter, loosening the PAP’s hegemonic grasp over the term. Opposition politicians could make opportune use of the idiom during campaigning. In response, PAP leaders reinterpreted bread-and-butter issues as municipal (albeit still economic), which they contrasted with national issues.⁸⁸ In other words, where previously the term had been expressed as ideologically distinct from liberal demands, in 2011 it was reinterpreted to point to the PAP’s advantages in securing municipal interests, deflecting attention away from the PAP’s shortcomings at the national level.

This strategy, however, was not entirely successful, given the downturn in electoral success in 2011 for the PAP. This also was the moment when the WP, the biggest opposition party at the time, decisively leaned into the hegemonic domain of bread-and-butter and contest elections on those grounds. At a political dialogue featuring multiple key opposition figures, the discussion focused in large part on the climate of fear surrounding opposition politics created by the PAP. A Straits Times report noted that apart from one question on transport issues, no bread-and-butter issues came up at the event.⁸⁹ Nonetheless, WP candidate Sylvia Lim was quoted as saying that bread-and-butter issues were still important on the ground, but that civil liberties were also important for some voters.⁹⁰ One reporter noted that the WP had “chose to aim its arguments to bread-and-butter issues like jobs, immigration, housing and high costs of living that upset Singaporeans.”⁹¹

The 2015 general election saw a dramatic vote percentage swing back to the PAP. The result has been attributed to the passing of Lee Kuan Yew that year and celebrations of Singapore’s fiftieth national day (SG50).⁹² PAP policy fixes to the issues that had hurt them in 2011 were another significant factor.⁹³ Yet, underneath these explanations was also the significant turnaround from a highly controversial publication of a population white paper in 2013, which projected a future population of as many as 6.9 million, prompting voter anxieties over immigration and overpopulation. While the headline narratives of 2015 surrounding the passing of Lee Kuan Yew and the SG50 celebrations indicate that postmaterialist considerations had become pre-eminent in ways that Rajaratnam had envisioned in the 1970s, the major parties continued to make clear references to bread-and-butter in their campaign strategies. Dylan Ng, a WP candidate, identified the specific concerns of residents as “still about the bread and butter, the overcrowding, the overpopulation … it’s about the universal issue facing Singaporeans.”⁹⁴ Meanwhile, in a Business Times article, the PAP’s Tin Pei Ling recounted her experiences taking over her father's coffee shop as a student, which had “taught her the importance of bread-and-butter issues and how difficult it was to make a living.”⁹⁵

By the 2020 general election, which took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, bread-and-butter had become hegemonic across Singapore's party political landscape.⁹⁶ Furthermore, this election took place against the background of inequality, especially after the publication of sociologist Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like and an IPS report on class divisions.⁹⁷ Bread-and-butter issues were heavily emphasized throughout the campaign. New PAP candidate Gan Siow Huang tied such issues to an economic survivalist mindset, that is “the importance of having a job, to be able to protect one’s live.”⁹⁸ Candidates from the WP, the Progress Singapore Party, and People’s Voice all emphasized the importance of bread-and-butter in their manifestos and allotted television speeches.⁹⁹ This approach was summed up in a Straits Times report which noted:

With a worst-ever recession looming for Singapore owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, bread-and-butter issues such as jobs, housing, immigration, the goods and services tax (GST), and the Central Provident Fund (CPF) were the focus of the seven parties.¹⁰⁰

Similarly, analysts quoted in mainstream newspapers were unanimous in their conviction that the election would be determined by bread-and-butter issues. In the lead-up to polling day, analysts were emphasized that “the hot button bread-and-butter issues will assume greater importance than before.”¹⁰¹ Political scientist Bilveer Singh conjured the survivalist element of bread-and-butter issues in dramatic terms, declaring, “This is a Covid-19 election. All other issues are secondary … maybe some NGOs will start talking about equal wage and environment, but for the majority of Singaporeans it’s about bread and butter, about life and death”.¹⁰² According to political analyst Felix Tan, “issues such as education, transport costs, and housing have always been the main concerns for Singaporeans … the very ‘Singapore Dream’ has been based on the stability of these bread-and-butter concerns.”¹⁰³ Sociologist Tan Ern Ser averred, writing that “Bread-and-butter issues have always been and will be very salient for as long as Singaporeans can’t take employment and income security for granted.”¹⁰⁴

In spite of this seeming consensus on the prevalence of bread-and-butter issues in the campaign, PAP performed relatively poorly. Immediate reactions painted a picture of a shift in electoral preferences away from bread-and-butter issues to explain this outcome. In The Straits Times’ post-election report, the same Felix Tan suggested that the opposition's message about needing more checks and balances and a diversity of views in Parliament resonated with voters, noting that “a crop of younger, more educated and discerning voters are looking beyond bread and butter issues.”¹⁰⁵ This was echoed in Channel News Asia’s post-election report, which suggested that the “opposition vote swing shows people are looking beyond bread and butter issues … ”¹⁰⁶ Law professor Eugene Tan pointed out that youth were “concerned about the post-material issues” such as “Singapore's identity and social inequality.” A post-election survey by IPS published three months later claimed that a combination of bread-and-butter issues and postmaterialist values were why the PAP had lost support.¹⁰⁷ Similar to 2011, at no time was it mentioned in the mainstream press that the PAP had failed to deliver bread-and-butter.

Attempts to challenge the discursive interpretation of bread-and-butter did emerge, but notably did so outside the realm of party politics and mainstream media sources. These critiques contested conventional understandings of bread-and-butter, suggesting in particular that social justice concerns were as important to voters as were typical material-economic issues. In a piece for Foreign Policy, journalist Kirsten Han took issue with the notion that social justice concerns (including growing attention to inequality) among young people were any less of a bread-and-butter issue:

The usual chatter is that young Singaporeans are less concerned than their parents and grandparents about bread-and-butter issues … that’s true, but it also fails to make the real connection: young Singaporeans, myself included, care about issues such as racism, inequality, and civil liberties because they recognize that these are inextricably linked to people’s well-being and ability to make ends meet.¹⁰⁸

Her sentiment was echoed in a commentary in Rice Media by Qian Qian Ng, who emphasized that the “dichotomy between young people’s ‘post-materialism’ and older peoples’ ‘pragmatism’ then, is an unnecessary and false generational divide.”¹⁰⁹ In an earlier Rice Media commentary, Pan Jie called bread-and-butter the “most meaningless phrase in politics” and suggested that the term was mainly used to “subtly slur, exclude, and deride causes you do not agree with,” and should be done away with.¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, environmental activist groups sought to link existing bread-and-butter discourse to climate concerns, suggesting that the latter intersected with bread-and-butter issues such as the cost of living, social inequality, and healthcare.¹¹¹

Beyond these voices from the margins, the period from 1981 up to 2020 saw the continued crystallization of bread-and-butter, the usage and understanding of which has become hegemonic in Singapore. Its use has been characterized by two major functions. The first centers on the importance of materialist-economic issues on political agenda, particularly in contrast with liberal and progressive issues. The second function has been partisan-political, used in particular by political actors to burnish their appeal against political rivals.

While the PAP’s continued hold on the use of bread-and-butter has been politically successful, its widespread adoption by the political opposition requires some explanation.¹¹² Our discourse-hegemony toolkit is designed to enable agency, and as such cannot attribute decisions based simply on structural reasons or a rational calculus. Suggesting by inference an enduring, hegemonic appeal of bread-and-butter and materialist conceptions of what constitutes a good life amongst the populace, as we have done, does not necessarily entail an ideological shift. Instead, bread-and-butter discourse has become politically useful for the opposition. In the 2011 election, in which the PAP received its lowest share of votes, opposition parties calculated that the PAP was increasingly unable to meet the high expectations of Singaporean voters for delivering material well-being. In other words, the WP pounced on perceptions of the PAP’s weaknesses in order to, as two analysts noted, “beat the PAP at its own game” where “various ‘‘bread-and-butter’’ issues … seriously impinged upon the PAP’s historical claim of equitable growth and internal and external security.”¹¹³ This illustrates how the term, which was used successfully by the PAP vis-à-vis the opposition in the 1970s, has assumed, from the 1980s, an autonomous force, and discursively has become one of the key objects of contestation among political parties.

As a result, while the PAP retains significant structural advantages in its claim to provide for bread-and-butter, opposition parties have been able to make rhetorical appeals to bread-and-butter needs in elections where the PAP has been perceived by voters to have fallen short. The political status of bread-and-butter has become well-entrenched, with any major efforts to reinterpret bread-and-butter marginalized from mainstream discourses. Within contemporary Singapore, political actors vie for the claim to be able to provide for the bread-and-butter needs for Singaporeans, but do not challenge the salience of this term.

Conclusion

This paper has adapted tenets of Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace the development of a popular idiom in Singapore – bread-and-butter – to offer an account of the relationship between ideological hegemony, social attitudes, and the continued dominance of the PAP in Singapore. Economic concerns – subsumed under the idiomatic banner of bread-and-butter issues – remain the primary object of politics in Singapore, where even opposition parties contest the PAP under these same parameters. In doing so, bread-and-butter reflects a basic materialist orientation of Singaporean politics. As Gramsci emphasized about common-sense notions, bread-and-butter is often invoked uncritically, and even contradictorily, by citizens and pundits alike even when they conform to the general economic-materialist understandings of the term. In contrast, when the term has demonstrated the most ideological coherence, it has been in a negative sense, counter-posed against liberal or progressive political demands coded under postmaterialist values.

Two critical aspects of a materialist politics in Singapore can be extracted from our account. Firstly, materialist considerations – namely the political commitment to improve the economic well-being of Singaporeans – remain critical in reproducing the political dominance of the PAP. Keeping voters’ focus on economic-material issues helps to stall demands for a more competitive democracy or for social change movements. In this regard, bread-and-butter has become a key part of the ideological toolkit that allows the Singapore government to refute the notion that with continued economic development will come an inevitable shift towards liberalization. In that regard, Singapore is able to “disavow” liberalism.¹¹⁴ By propagating the notion of themselves as the most reliable providers of the material needs of Singaporeans, the PAP retains an advantage over opposition parties within this discursive terrain. In other words, the overall effort to resist democratization is supported by interventions into the discursive landscape. An emphasis on interventions also reveals discourse to be a site of political agency, where different actors shape the boundaries of what constitutes legitimate political claims, as Foucault, amongst others, has detailed.

Secondly and relatedly, bread-and-butter has also ossified into the object of contestation in Singapore’s politics. While the PAP maintains significant incumbency advantages over its political rivals in its claim to provide bread-and-butter, the centrality of materialist politics in turn generates voter expectations for the PAP to meet. Opposition parties are able to effectively lean into the discursive grip of bread-and-butter to gain political support when the PAP falters in providing for the economic needs of citizens. The strategy therefore never completely insulates the regime from political contestation, but merely attempts to define the terrain of politics. While Singaporean politics might remain stable at the regime level, politics is never a closed process or foregone conclusion.

We hope our account can lay the groundwork for provoking questions and highlighting themes within Singaporean politics and society that deserve further exploration. Utilizing bread-and-butter as a thread illuminates the politics of the materialist/postmaterialist dyad and its relationship to Singaporean politics and state-society relations, but at the same time runs into limitations as an analytical tool. For one, expressions of materialist or postmaterialist values can escape the scope of a particular linguistic sign, and thereby provide only partial glimpses of the broader universe of discursive articulations or hegemonic practices that coalesce around these key themes. In other words, the arc of bread-and-butter discourse gestures at the need to bring other tools to bear on larger thematic analyses of materialism in Singapore. The economic materialism prevalent in Singapore has also been tempered by warnings from PAP leaders, who have attempted to temper the development of a materialistic social ethic from the excesses of affluence, sometimes in the form of invoking postmaterialist sentiments.¹¹⁵ For example, Rajaratnam’s exchanges with then-PAP stalwart Devan Nair throughout the 1970s revolved around navigating either a spiritual or materialist public philosophy.¹¹⁶ Conversely, Rajaratnam’s postmaterialist bent was also tempered when he faced an international audience; when speaking at the United Nations General Assembly and the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, he counseled a materialist philosophy as more prudent for fellow Third World nations, strikingly stating that while it is true that “man does not live by bread alone...But without bread man does not live at all.”¹¹⁷

Looking ahead to the 2020s, we note attempts to synthesize the economic materialism of bread-and-butter with a renewed form of postmaterialism, in line with Rajaratnam’s twist. This lineage appears in the new PAP leadership’s “Forward Singapore” vision released in late 2023, which gestures towards a postmaterialist terrain. This has been done in various ways, including through the vernacularized language surrounding the so-called “five Cs”: condominium, car, cash, credit card and country club membership, which previously represented material aspirations that encompassed the Singaporean vision of the good life associated with consumer culture.¹¹⁸ While Prime Minister Lawrence Wong “acknowledged that bread and butter issues like housing are still important,” he used the Forward Singapore exercise as an opportunity to counsel that “the Singapore Dream is more than just material success” associated with the “five Cs”, and reoriented conceptions of the good life towards non-material, even postmaterial, achievements.¹¹⁹ This itself has precedent, where as Minister of the Arts in 1988, George Yeo reformulated the “five Cs” away from its materialist foundations, and instead towards a communitarian ethos.¹²⁰

This brings us back to the dialectical nature of bread-and-butter we highlight at key points in our exploration – the more the PAP is seen to have met citizens’ bread-and-butter needs, the more civil society might be freed to adopt postmaterialist values. Given that the PAP’s performance legitimacy is tied to its ability to deliver bread-and-butter to citizens, this dialectical conundrum acquires a political character. It requires the PAP to consistently check the ideological implications of economic growth, and entails a condition of abiding ideological management. Between the entrenched materialism of bread-and-butter discourse and gestures towards Rajaratnam’s postmaterialism, we may glimpse how Singapore society continues to grapple with the issue, without any obvious resolution.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who read drafts and commented on iterations of this paper, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Early versions were presented at the National University of Singapore’s 2021 Political Science Graduate Conference, and also submitted as a term paper at a Masters-level course at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Nanyang Technological University. We thank everyone that gave feedback on those occasions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible with financial support from the Chevening Scholarship, the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy.

Notes on contributors

Say Jye Quah

Quah Say Jye is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the history of political thought from 1945 to the present, political theory, and historical international relations. His dissertation focuses on theorizing postcolonial socialist thought, particularly in Indonesia and Singapore.

Bertrand Seah

Bertrand Seah is a sustainability consultant, having recently completed his Masters in Environmental Policy and Regulation at the London School of Economics under a Chevening Scholarship. His research interests lie at the intersection of state-society relations, environmental politics, and the political economy of climate change in Singapore.

Notes

1 See Sim 2006; Rodan 1993; Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2005.

2 The International Monetary Fund estimates that Singapore’s GDP per capita rose from US$500 in 1965 (at the point of independence), to over US$88,000 in 2024, the fifth highest in the world. See International Monetary Fund, “Singapore Datasets, ”https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/SGP.

3 Chong 2006, 25.

See Abdullah 2020; Barr 2014; George 2007; Morgenbesser 2017; Ortmann 2011; Rajah 2012; Rodan 2008; Ibrahim 2018, Weiss 2020, Thompson 2019, George 2007.

5 Loh 2023b.

6 Chua 2017.

7 Rodan 2011; Abdullah 2017.

8 Teo and Vasu 2023; Abdullah 2017; Chua 1995.

9 Rajah 2012; Liow 2012; Teo 2019.

10 The most popular usage of this term is as “bread-and-butter issues,” but for our purposes we include similar formulations, including “bread-and-butter needs,” “bread-and-butter problems,” and “bread-and-butter demands.”

11 E.g. Chong 2005; Rodan 1996.

12 Foucault 2002. See also Gutting 2019.

13 Gutting 2019, 36. To be clear, this is not to suggest that Foucault only focuses on language. Foucault highlights the wider range of social practices, within which language is an especially prominent aspect. Here, we limit ourselves to this linguistic element, but use it to highlight broader social and political trends. We return to this in the conclusion.

14 Foucault 2020.

15 See e.g. Lane 2012; Epstein 2021.

16 Fraser 1989, 294.

17 Fraser 1989, 292. Italics in original.

18 Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 112.

19 This does not mean that the meanings of either “bread-and-butter” or “needs” is infinitely open-ended, nor do we mean to imply that this is Fraser’s position. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the idiom bread-and-butter as “being as basic as the earning of one's livelihood,” as “reliable,” an as “dependable as a source of income.” This is not inconsequential – language is both a constraining and enabling tool, and for a term to be intelligible, it must bear some relationship with the meanings immanent within the Wittgensteinian “language-game” of a specific society and historical moment (Wittgenstein 2001; see also Skinner 2002). Translated to practical usage, this means that the meanings attached to the term are flexible only within a reasonable scope of deviation from the traditional idiomatic meaning, lest the articulation be unintelligible to a wider audience.

20 See e.g. Inglehart 1977; 1990; Inglehart and Welzel 2005.

21 Chua 1995; 2017.

22 Gramsci 1971, 220-221.

23 Chua 2023.

24 Gramsci 1971, 57.

25 Gramsci, 1971, 322. While Chua’s use of ideological hegemony has been generative of a broad range of scholarship on Singapore politics (e.g. Abdullah 2018; Chong 2005; Worthington 2003), it has been generally assimilated into studies of Singaporean politics employing the tools of mainstream political science rather than spurring analyses of their own. A curious feature of this scholarship has been a focus on culture, rather than a combination of material and ideational elements as put forward by Gramsci. For broader critiques on the cultural turn in Gramscian analysis, see Kandil 2011.

26 On survival, see also Chan 1971; on pragmatism, see also Tan 2012.

27 Chua 1995, 58.

28 Chua 1994, 657.

29 See also Tan 2012.

30 In other words, the PAP is constructing and policing the parameters of a discourse that defines the ends of politics to be the provision of certain basic material concerns. Bread-and-butter is one of the key signifiers within this wider discourse of materialist politics. This discourse is framed as “commonsense,” despite the challengers to it throughout the decades since independence.

31 See Skinner 2002.

32 See Ng 2010. Rajaratnam also served concurrently as Minister of Labor from 1968 to 1971.

33 Quah 2023.

34 Chan 1971.

35 The Straits Times 1968.

36 The Straits Times 1968.

37 The Straits Times 1970.

38 On modernization theory, see Gilman 2007; Rostow 1990.

39 Pang 1973.

40 Pang 1973.

41 Pang 1971.

42 On the ideology of pragmatism in Singapore, see Chua 1995.

43 Quoted in the New Nation 1972.

44 The Straits Times 1976.

45 Lee 1977.

46 Osman, Joseph, and Ngiam 1979.

47 New Nation 1979.

48 Toh 1979.

49 Goh 1979.

50 The Straits Times 1981.

51 Tsang 1983.

52 The Straits Times 1979.

53 New Nation 1980.

54 Quoted in The Straits Times 1984.

55 The Business Times 1984; Wong 1984.

56 Yap, Lim and Leong, 2010.

57 Yap, Lim and Leong, 2010; Jayakumar 2022.

58 See e.g. Rodan 1992.

59 Fong 1991.

60 Han 1991.

61 Han 1991.

62 Henson and Tan 1991.

63 The Straits Times 1991.

64 Yap, Lim and Leong 2010, 460-462.

65 Quoted in Mutalib 1992, 302.

66 Teo 2006a. Young voters were labeled “post-65ers,” as voters born after Singapore’s independence in 1965.

67 The Straits Times 2006.

68 Teo 2006a.

69 Laclau and Mouffe 1985.

70 Today 2006.

71 Sandhu 2013. The scandal concerned the misuse of funds by the leadership of the National Kidney Foundation, a charitable organization, which was revealed during a defamation trial against Singapore Press Holdings for publishing whistleblower accounts about malpractice.

72 Lai 2006.

73 Kwek 2006.

74 Kwek 2006.

75 Lim 2006; The New Paper 2006.

76 Kwek 2006.

77 Teo 2006b.

78 Teo 2006b.

79 Ortmann 2016; Ong and Tim 2014.

80 A GRC is synonymous with the party block voting system used in countries such as the United Kingdom. In the 2011 election, PAP won eighty-one seats, the Workers’ Party led by Low Thia Khiang won eight seats, and the Singapore People’s Party, led by Chiam See Tong, won one seat.

81 See Tan and Lee 2011; Tan 2014.

82 Lee 2011.

83 Lee 2011.

84 Teo 2011.

85 Chua 2011a.

86 Chua 2011b.

87 Chua 2011b.

88 On municipal politics in post-independence Singapore, see Weiss 2020.

89 Chuang 2011.

90 Chuang 2011.

91 Seah 2011.

92 See e.g. Ortmann 2016.

93 Chua 2017.

94 Lee 2015.

95 Tan 2015.

96 For 2020, we went beyond newspaper archives and used readily available online webpages of various media outlets.

97 Teo 2018; Paulo and Low 2018.

98 Yuen and Ho 2020.

99 Low 2020.

100 Low 2020.

101 Hussain 2020.

102 Koh 2020.

103 Hussain 2020.

104 Hussain 2020.

105 Mahmud and Mohan 2020. See also Jayakumar 2022; Singh, Abdullah, and Tan 2020.

106 Mahmud and Mohan 2020.

107 Ho 2020.

108 Han 2020.

109 Ng 2020.

110 Pan 2019.

111 Tan 2020.

112 We thank Reviewer 1 for pushing us to think through this.

113 Ong and Tim 2014.

114 Chua 2017.

115 We thank Reviewer 2 for pushing us to elaborate on this.

116 See Quah 2023.

117 Rajaratnam 2007, 414.

118 Chua 2003. Chua’s analysis here is ripe for engagement with Veblen 2017.

119 Loh 2023a, 2023b. See also Quek 2023.

120 Yeo 2015.