July 15, 2022

In July 2020, Singaporeans came together to elect their Group Representation Constituency members for the next five years. General Elections 2020 (GE2020) was the first time elections were held during a global pandemic, but one thing remained constant. There were still no sweeping alliances among the opposition parties who contested the dominant incumbent party, the People’s Action Party (PAP).

In ‘Failing to Build Opposition Alliances in Singapore, 1965–2020’ (Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies (University of Michigan Press, 2022)), Assistant Professor Elvin Ong (NUS Political Science) asserts that Singapore’s opposition parties strategically chose not to build opposition alliances even when they could have done so. He examines these political calculations of opposition parties, through interviews with several prominent opposition leaders.

Opposition parties are often unincentivised to build ‘fully-fledged pre-electoral alliances’, which would involve the buy-in of all prominent opposition parties and entail the consistent use of a unified coalition campaign. Generally, opposition parties perceive the costs of alliance building to exceed its limited benefits. Early on in Singapore’s post-independent electoral history, opposition parties who had been ‘cast into the political wilderness’ by the PAP’s dominance were anxious to re-enter the political arena. As such, they entered ‘three-cornered fights’ without adequate political clout, attaining disastrous electoral results that would continue to influence opposition strategic logic for decades to come. Today, opposition leaders are wary of the personal costs of coalition formation, namely the necessary compromise with other opposition parties to smooth over ideological differences. This would reduce their autonomy to make political decisions, outweighing any minimal electoral gains from a joint campaign.

However, opposition parties do cooperate with one another to a certain extent. In the past five decades, they have almost always coordinated by allocating geographically segregated electoral districts to different opposition parties, to avoid competing against each other rather than against the PAP alone. They did so through adopting the informal rule of ‘first dibs’ on each constituency, and through gauging their relative popularity in each constituency. This strategic allocation is crucial to avoid splitting opposition votes and therefore maximise their individual vote shares and probability of winning against the PAP. Nonetheless, such intra-opposition coordination was sometimes hampered by the incumbent party’s gerrymandering, creating disputes between opposition parties as to which constituencies each of them should contest.

Asst Prof Ong notes that altogether, the prospect of building ‘fully-fledged pre-electoral opposition alliances’ in Singapore (which some consider to have an autocratic regime) has arguably been limited. As far as the PAP has remained impenetrable, opposition parties have not sought to build a coalition government, but merely resolved to continue strategically allocating electoral districts to different opposition parties. Foregrounding these cost-benefit analyses of opposition parties is integral to deepening our understanding of Singapore’s electoral ecosystem, especially as Singapore transitions to its fourth generation (4G) leadership.

Read the chapter here.

The Singapore Research Nexus (SRN) at NUS FASS is holding a book launch for Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies at The Pod, NLB on Sunday, 31 July, at 2pm. Register here.